Final Years
In 1991 Smyslov won the inaugural World Senior Chess Championship. He played no competitive games after the 2001 Klompendans Veterans versus Ladies tournament in Amsterdam. His Elo rating after this event was 2494.
Smyslov died of heart failure in hospital in Moscow on the morning of 27 March 2010, three days after his 89th birthday.
Read more about this topic: Vasily Smyslov
Famous quotes containing the words final and/or years:
“Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death, a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves ... and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will.”
—Coleman Dowell (19251985)
“And the immortal music of Chopin
Which we had been discovering for several months
Since we were fourteen years old. And coffee grounds,
And the wonder of hands, and the wonder of the day
When the child discovers her first dead hand.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)