Mir Sultan Khan

Mir Sultan Khan
Mir Sultan Khan
Full name	Malik Mir Sultan Khan
Born	1905 Punjab, British India
Died	25 April 1966 (aged c. 61) Punjab, Pakistan

Malik Mir Sultan Khan (1905 – 25 April 1966) was the strongest chess master of his time from Asia. A servant from British India, he travelled 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 have called him "perhaps the greatest natural player of modern times". 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).

Sultan Khan was born in United Punjab, British India, where he learned Indian chess from his father at the age of nine. 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 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.