Akiba Kiwelowicz Rubinstein (1 December 1880 – 14 March 1961) was a Polish chess player. He is considered to have been one of the greatest players never to have become World Chess Champion. Rubinstein was granted the title International Grandmaster in 1950, at its inauguration.
In his youth, he defeated top players 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 re-create consistently the same form after the war, and his later life was plagued by mental illness.
Biography
Early life
Akiba Kiwelowicz Rubinstein was born in Stawiski, Congress Poland, to a Jewish family. He was the youngest of 12 children, but only one sister survived to adulthood. Rubinstein learned to play chess at the relatively late age of 14, 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 Kyiv, Rubinstein decided to abandon his rabbinical studies and devote himself entirely to chess.
Chess career
Between 1907 and 1912, Rubinstein established himself as one of the strongest players in the world. In 1907, he won the Carlsbad tournament and the All-Russian Masters' tournament, and shared first at Saint Petersburg. In 1912 he had a record string of wins, finishing first in five consecutive major tournaments: San Sebastián, Pöstyén, Breslau, Warsaw and Vilna (All-Russian Masters' tournament), although none of these events included Lasker or Capablanca. Some sources believe that he was stronger 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.
During the first decade of the 20th century, the playing field for competitive chess was relatively thin. Wilhelm Steinitz, the first universally recognized world champion, died in 1900 after having been largely retired from chess for several years, Russian master Mikhail Chigorin was nearing the end of his life, while American master Frank Marshall lived on the other side of the Atlantic, far from the center of chess activity in Europe. Another promising American master, Harry Nelson Pillsbury, had died in 1906 at just 33. In the pre-FIDE era, the reigning world champion handpicked his challenger, and Emanuel Lasker demanded a high sum of money that Rubinstein could not produce. In the St. Petersburg tournament in 1909, he had tied with Lasker and won his individual encounter with him. However, he had a poor showing at the 1914 St. Petersburg tournament, not placing in the top five. A match with Lasker was arranged for October 1914, but it did not take place because of the outbreak of World War I.
Rubinstein's peak as a player is generally considered to have been between 1907 and 1914. During World War I, he was confined to Poland, although he played in a few organized chess events there and traveled to Berlin in early 1918 for a tournament. His playing after the war never regained the same consistency as it had pre-1914. He and his family moved to Sweden following the Armistice in November 1918, where they stayed until 1922, and then moved to Germany. Rubinstein won at Vienna in 1922, ahead of future World Champion Alexander Alekhine, and was the leader of the Polish team that won the 1930 Chess Olympiad at Hamburg with a record of thirteen wins and four draws. He also won an Olympic silver at the 1931 Chess Olympiad, again leading the Polish team.
Rubinstein came in fourth place in the London 1922 tournament, after which the new world champion Jose Raul Capablanca offered to play him in a match if he could raise the money, which once again he was unable to do. At Hastings 1922, he came in second place, followed by a fifth-place finish at Teplitz-Schönau late in the year, and then won in Vienna brilliantly. This triumph, however, was soured when Austrian border guards impounded most of the prize money he had won. Rubinstein closed out 1922 with another appearance at Hastings, which he won, but his tournament record during 1923 was disappointing as he came in just twelfth place at Carlsbad and tenth at Maehrisch-Ostrau.