Hermanis Matisons (; 1894, Riga – 1932) was a Latvian chess player and one of world's most highly regarded chess masters in the early 1930s. He was also a leading composer of endgame studies. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 38.

In 1924, Matisons won the first Latvian Chess Championship tournament. Later that year he finished ahead of Fricis Apšenieks, and Edgard Colle to win the first World Amateur Championship, which was organized in conjunction with the Paris Olympic Games, followed by Max Euwe in 1928. Matisons played first board for Latvia at the 1931 Chess Olympiad in Prague and defeated Akiba Rubinstein and Alexander Alekhine, then the reigning World Champion.

Hermanis Matisons

Sixty of Matisons' endgame studies were collected in the 1987 book Mattison's Chess Endgame Studies by T.G. Whitworth.

Hermanis Matisons

References

1894 births

1932 deaths

Sportspeople from Riga

People from the Governorate of Livonia

Chess Olympiad competitors

20th-century deaths from tuberculosis

Latvian chess players

Jewish chess players

Latvian Jews

Chess composers

20th-century chess players

Tuberculosis deaths in Latvia

Hermanis Matisons