Gyula Breyer

Book excerpt: Although his career lasted barely ten years, Gyula Breyer (1893-1921) was a highly successful and imaginative chess player. He won the championship of his native country Hungary as a teenager and achieved remarkable results against the leading players of his day. But first and foremost, Breyer was a revolutionary in his chess thinking. He promoted the idea of dynamic chess and formulated many of the Hypermodern concepts, long before others started their investigations. After his death, however, he was omitted from most of the chess history books, or relegated to a one line reference. Today he is only known for the Breyer variation, an ever popular defence against the Ruy Lopez. Jimmy Adams has unlocked Breyer’s legacy from the archives and made it accessible to the chess world at large, with translations from Hungarian into English. This monumental book presents 242 of his games, annotated by Breyer himself and many others. It features a large number of articles, columns and fragments from newspapers, magazines and books, sparkling with chess and literary wit. The majority appear in English for the first time – and indeed in any language other than Hungarian. By piecing together this material in chronological order, Jimmy Adams has constructed a mesmerizing biography, covering Gyula Breyer’s intense, unconventional and ultimately tragic life. Also included is a collection of his chess problems, some of which are truly amazing.