Isaak Oskarovich Lipnitsky was born in 1923 in Kiev; passionate about chess as a child, he played in the Ukrainian Championship at age 16 and was a rival of David Bronstein who would go on to become Challenger in 1951. With Operation Barbarossa initiating the Great Patriotic War, Lipnitsky attended military academy, graduating as Lieutenant in the Red Army with counterespionage duties. He fought in the Battle of Stalingrad and all the way though to Berlin; his service record can be found at the Museum of the Great Patriotic War.
After the war he resumed his chess career, winning the 1949 Ukrainian Championship and thus became a Master. The following year he was in a three-way tie for second in the Soviet Championship. In 1956 he once again won the Ukrainian Championship in Kiev, scoring an outstanding +11=8, and authored Вопросы современной шахматной теории—Questions of Modern Chess Theory. It is for this publication he is remembered: reprinted fifty years later in the original Russian and a year after that in English, it is now considered a classic of chess literature.
In 1956 Fischer was 13 and consuming all chess matter he could get his hands on. His mother brought him to a Russian store in Greenwich Village—under FBI surveillance, naturally—where he purchased the Lipnitsky volume; going through it, for the first time he asked his mother for help with text as Bobby was interested in the position and moves more than a foreign language up to that point.
Many attest that Fischer carried this book while travelling for at least a year, and further the future Eleventh World Champion mentioned more than once that it helped him become a Grandmaster. Bruce Pandolfini, noted author and the real-life chess coach in Searching for Bobby Fischer, was elated to pay a pretty penny for Fischer’s copy in the late 1960s.
Not long after obtaining Lipnitsky’s masterwork, Fischer’s name would be printed around the globe for his dazzling performance with the Black pieces against one of America’s leading players. The influence of 16…Ba6!! in the second game of “Chapter 11 – The Initiative” on Fischer’s celebrated 11…Na4!! is clear, as we will see in tomorrow’s Oak Anniversary article.
While he never played internationally, Lipnitsky won against many Soviet luminaries and champions: Smyslov and Petrosian (both World Champions), Keres, Kotov, Averbakh, Taimanov and Geller to name but seven.
In 1959 leukemia took away Master Lipnitsky aged 35.
Here is Fischer’s Game of the Century; a full narrative and analysis will be forthcoming in the post commemorating the Oak Anniversary of the occasion.
