Biography
He learned to play chess when he was 16. He trained with and played against the strong master Gersz Salwe in Łódź. Rubinstein was Jewish, and his family planned for him to become a rabbi. However, in 1903, after finishing fifth in a tournament in Kiev, Rubinstein decided to abandon his rabbinical studies and devote himself entirely to chess.
Between 1907 and 1912, Rubinstein established himself as one of the strongest players in the world. In 1907, he won the Karlovy Vary tournament and shared first at St. Petersburg. In 1912 he had a record string of wins, finishing first in five consecutive major tournaments: San Sebastian, Piešťany, Breslau (the German championship), Warsaw and Vilnius (although none of these events included Lasker or Capablanca). Some believe that he was better than world champion Emanuel Lasker at this time. Ratings from Chessmetrics support this conclusion, placing him as world No. 1 between mid 1912 and mid 1914.
At the time when it was common for the reigning world champion to handpick his challengers, Rubinstein was never given a chance to play Lasker for the world chess championship because he was unable to raise enough money to meet Lasker's financial demands. In the St. Petersburg tournament in 1909, he had tied with Lasker and won his individual encounter with him. However, he had a poor showing at the 1914 St. Petersburg tournament, not placing in the top five. A match with Lasker was arranged for October 1914, but it never took place because of the outbreak of World War I.
After the war Rubinstein was still an elite grandmaster, but his results lacked their previous formidable consistency. Nevertheless, he won at Vienna in 1922, ahead of future world champion Alexander Alekhine, and was the leader of the Polish team that won the 1930 Chess Olympiad at Hamburg with a record of thirteen wins and four draws. A year later he won an Olympic silver.
After 1932 he withdrew from tournament play, mostly because his schizophrenic tendencies became prevalent; he was suffering from anthropophobia, a fear of people and society. In one period, after making a chess move he would go and hide in the corner of the tournament hall while awaiting his opponent's reply. Unlike other great grandmasters, he left behind no literary legacy, which may be attributed to his mental problems. He spent the last 29 years of his life suffering from severe mental illness, living at various times at home with his family and in a sanatorium. It is not clear how the Jewish grandmaster survived World War II in Nazi-occupied Belgium. One oft-related story is that the Nazis arrived one day to take him to the death camps, but he was so patently insane that they abandoned the attempt. However, there is no documentation to support this tale.
Read more about this topic: Akiba Rubinstein
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