Svetozar Gligorić Gliga

Svetozar Gligoric, Yugoslav chess grandmaster, was acknowledged as one of the greatest chess players of the 1950s and ’60s; he won games in nontitle matches against such world champions as Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov, Mikhail Tal, and Bobby Fischer but never managed to play for the world title. Gligoric learned chess at age 11 and won the 1938 Belgrade chess championship at 15. He suspended his career to fight with the guerrilla resistance during World War II and then resumed playing at the war’s end, attaining the rank of international master in 1950 and grandmaster in 1951. He won the Yugoslav chess championship 12 times during 1947–71 and was declared the country’s best athlete by the government in 1958. Gligoric also wrote extensively on chess. His best-known book, Fischer vs. Spassky: The Chess Match of the Century (1973), is an evaluation of the 1972 world championship. Gligoric’s calm, fundamental approach to chess was reflected in the title of his autobiography, I Play Against Pieces (2002). He retired in 2003. In his final years he explored a lifelong love of music, and at age 88 he released a multigenre 12-track CD, How I Survived the 20th Century (2011).