George Koltanowski (also "Georges"; 17 September 1903 – 5 February 2000) was a Belgian-born American chess player, promoter, and writer. He was informally known as "Kolty". Koltanowski set the world's blindfold record on 20 September 1937, in Edinburgh, by playing 34 chess games simultaneously while blindfolded, making headline news around the world. He also set a record in 1960 for playing 56 consecutive blindfold games at ten seconds per move.
Early life
Born into a Polish Jewish family in Antwerp, Belgium, Koltanowski learned chess by watching his father and brother play. He took up the game seriously at the age of 14, and became the top Belgian player when Edgard Colle died in 1932.
Chess career
He got his first big break in chess at age 21, when he visited an international tournament in Meran, planning to play in one of the reserve sections. The organizers were apparently confused or mixed up about his identity and asked him to play in the grandmaster section, to replace an invited player who had not shown up. Koltanowski gladly accepted and finished near the bottom, but drew with Grandmaster Tarrasch and gained valuable experience.
He thereafter played in at least 25 international tournaments. He was Belgian Chess Champion in 1923, 1927, 1930, and 1936. Koltanowski became better known for touring and giving simultaneous exhibitions and blindfold displays.
Based upon his results during the period 1932–37, Professor Arpad Elo gave Koltanowski a rating of 2450 in The Rating of Chess Players. Koltanowski was awarded the International Master title in 1950 when the title was first officially established by FIDE, and he was awarded an honorary Grandmaster title in 1988. Koltanowski's record as a tournament player was not especially distinguished. He showed up for the 1946 U.S. Open in Pittsburgh, but was eliminated in the preliminary section and did not qualify for the finals.
In those years, the U.S. Open was played in round-robin preliminary and final sections. The next year, Koltanowski returned, not as a player but as the director, introducing the Swiss system to the U.S. Open. He directed the 1947 U.S. Open in Corpus Christi, Texas, using the Swiss system for the first time ever in a U.S. Open chess event. After that, he traversed the country, holding Swiss system tournaments everywhere. Before long, the Swiss system was adopted as the standard for most chess tournaments in America.
Koltanowski thereafter toured the United States tirelessly for years, running chess tournaments and giving simultaneous exhibitions everywhere. After his failure in the 1946 U.S. Open in Pittsburgh, he never played tournament chess again, except for two games as a member of the U.S. team in the 10th Chess Olympiad (Helsinki 1952), getting a draw with Soviet Grandmaster Alexander Kotov, one of the strongest players in the world, and a draw with Hungarian International Master Tibor Florian, in a game which Koltanowski appeared to be winning.
Blindfold chess
On 4 December 1960, in San Francisco, California, Koltanowski played 56 consecutive games blindfolded, with only ten seconds per move. He won fifty and drew six games. Koltanowski still holds the record in the Guinness Book of Records.
Simultaneous blindfold chess
Possessed of an incredibly powerful memory, Koltanowski would give blindfold exhibitions, playing several games simultaneously. In Edinburgh in 1937 Koltanowski set a record by simultaneously playing 34 games of blindfold chess. Later, Miguel Najdorf broke that record, but Koltanowski claimed his efforts were not properly monitored. Najdorf played 40 games at Rosario, Argentina in 1943 and 45 games in São Paulo in 1947.
Later years
Many of Koltanowski's relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. Koltanowski survived because he happened to be on a chess tour of South America and was in Guatemala when the war broke out. In 1940, the United States Consul in Cuba saw Koltanowski giving a chess exhibition in Havana and decided to grant him a U.S. visa.
Koltanowski met his wife Leah on a blind date in New York in 1944. They settled in San Francisco in 1947. Koltanowski became the chess columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, which carried his chess column every day for the next 52 years until his death, publishing an estimated 19,000 columns.
The FIDE named him International Arbiter in 1960.