Akiba Rubinstein

Akiba Rubinstein
Rubinstein c. 1907/1908
Full name	Akiba Kiwelowicz Rubinstein
Country	Russian Empire Poland
Born	(1880-12-01)1 December 1880 Stawiski, Congress Poland
Died	14 March 1961(1961-03-14) (aged 80) Antwerp, Belgium
Title	Grandmaster (1950)

Akiba Kiwelowicz Rubinstein (1 December 1880 – 14 March 1961) was a Polish chess grandmaster who is considered to have been one of the strongest players never to have become World Chess Champion.

In his youth, he defeated top players such as José Raúl Capablanca and Carl Schlechter and was scheduled to play a match with Emanuel Lasker for the World Chess Championship in 1914, but it was cancelled due to the outbreak of World War I. He was unable to recreate the same form after the War, and his later life was plagued by mental illness.

Akiba Kiwelowicz Rubinstein was born on 1 December 1880 in Stawiski, Congress Poland to a Jewish family. He learned to play chess at the relatively late age of 16, and his family had planned for him to become a rabbi. He trained with and played against the strong master Gersz Salwe in Łódź and 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, 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.