Mir Sultan Khan

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Mir Sultan Khan bigraphy, stories - Pakistani chess player

Mir Sultan Khan : biography

1905 – 25 April 1966

Malik Mir Sultan Khan (1905 – April 25, 1966) was the strongest chess master of his time from Asia. A manservant from British India, he traveled with Colonel Nawab Sir Umar Hayat Khan ("Sir Umar"), his master, to Britain, where he took the chess world by storm. In an international chess career of less than five years (1929–33), he won the British Championship three times in four tries (1929, 1932, 1933), and had tournament and match results that placed him among the top ten players in the world. Sir Umar then brought him back to his homeland, where he gave up chess and returned to his humble life. David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld call him "perhaps the greatest natural player of modern times".David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess (2nd ed. 1992), Oxford University Press, p. 402. ISBN 0-19-866164-9. Although he was one of the world’s top players in the early 1930s, FIDE, the World Chess Federation, never awarded him any title (Grandmaster or International Master).

Later life

Miss Fatima, also a servant of Sir Umar, had won the British Ladies Championship in 1933 by a remarkable three-point margin, scoring ten wins, one draw, and no losses.Sergeant, pp. 281, 338. She said that Sultan Khan, upon his return to India, felt as though he had been freed from prison.Hooper & Whyld, pp. 402-03. In the damp English climate, he had been continually afflicted with malaria, colds, influenza, and throat infections, often arriving to play with his neck swathed in bandages.Hooper & Whyld, p. 403.Coles, p. 8. Sir Umar died in 1944, leaving Sultan Khan a small farmstead, where he lived for the rest of his life. Ather Sultan, his eldest son, recalled that he would not coach his children at chess, telling them that they should do something more useful with their lives.

Sultan Khan died of tuberculosis in Sargodha, Pakistan (the same district where he had been born) on April 25, 1966.Jeremy Gaige, Chess Personalia: A Biobibliography, McFarland, 1987, p. 412. ISBN 0-7864-2353-6.

Chess career

Sultan Khan was born in United Punjab, British India, where he learned Indian chess from his father at the age of nine.Anne Sunnucks, The Encyclopaedia of Chess, St. Martin’s Press, 1970, p. 443. Under the rules of that game at the time, the laws of pawn promotion and stalemate were different, and a pawn could not move two squares on the first move. By the time he was 21 he was considered the strongest player in the Punjab. At that time, Sir Umar took him into his household with the idea of teaching him the European version of the game and introducing him to European master chess. In 1928, he won the all-India championship, scoring eight wins, one draw, and no losses.Raymond Keene, writing in Harry Golombek (editor), Golombek’s Encyclopedia of Chess, Crown Publishing, 1977, p. 313. ISBN 0-517-53146-1. From this particular point of view, Sultan Khan’s transition to western chess is similar to that of Philipp Stamma; who only after his arrival to Europe got acquainted with the western rules.

In the spring of 1929, Sir Umar took him to London, where a training tournament was organized for his benefit. Due to his inexperience and lack of theoretical knowledge, he did poorly, tying for last place with H. G. Conde, behind William Winter and Frederick Yates. After the tournament, Winter and Yates trained with him to help prepare him for the British Chess Championship to be held that summer. To everyone’s surprise, he won.Philip W. Sergeant, A Century of British Chess, David McKay, 1934, pp. 278-79, 331-32. Soon afterward, he went back to India with Sir Umar.

Returning to Europe in May 1930, Sultan Khan began an international chess career that included the defeats of many of the world’s leading players. His best results were second to Savielly Tartakower at Liège 1930; third at Hastings 1930-31 (scoring five wins, two draws, and two losses) behind future World Champion Max Euwe and former World Champion José Raúl Capablanca; fourth at Hastings 1931-32; fourth at Bern 1932 (ten wins, two draws, three losses); and a tie for third with Isaac Kashdan at London 1932, behind World Champion Alexander Alekhine and Salo Flohr. Sultan Khan again won the British Championship in 1932 and 1933.Sergeant, pp. 279-81, 331. In matches he defeated Tartakower in 1931 (four wins, five draws, and three losses) and narrowly lost to Flohr in 1932 (one win, three draws, and two losses).