Fridrik Olafsson 1935-2025

Fridrik Olafsson, Iceland’s first grandmaster, two-time Nordic Champion, six-time Icelandic champion, the oldest living candidate for the world chess championship, and former FIDE President, passed away on Friday April 4 aged 90 after enduring a short but severe illness. His death was announced on Monday by the Icelandic Chess Federation.

Olafsson was among the world’s best 50 players for about a quarter of a century, between 1955 and 1980. In this period, he defeated many of the biggest names in chess, including World Champions Mikhail Tal, Tigran Petrosian, Bobby Fischer, and Anatoly Karpov, but also e.g. Paul Keres, Efim Geller, Viktor Korchnoi, Mark Taimanov, Yuri Averbakh, Miguel Najdorf, Bent Larsen, Svetozar Gligoric, Lajos Portisch, Robert Hubner, Zoltan Ribli, Ulf Andersson, Jan Timman, Tony Miles, and Yasser Seirawan.

Olafsson personally made chess very popular in his country – which famously has the largest number of grandmasters per capita – long before the huge boost that the Match of the Century would give to Iceland. In 1958, he became Iceland’s first grandmaster and nothing less than a national hero. 

“When I look back to those years, it seems to me that Fridrik’s position was not much different from Bjork’s position later,” wrote Gudmundur Thorarinsson, former Icelandic Chess Federation president and co-organizer of the Fischer-Spassky match in 1972.

“Fridrik’s achievements at the chessboard were on an international level despite isolation and difficult circumstances,” Thorarinsson added. “Not only did his performances attract attention in this country but also abroad. Many strands were interwoven in enhancing this influence: glorious victories, a decent and modest demeanor, and a handsome and cheerful young man with a sort of a gentlemanly appearance.”  

Fridrik Olafsson was born January 26, 1935 in Reykjavik. He learned the rules of the game when he was eight from his father, during the Second World War and before Iceland became independent from Denmark, in 1944. 

He played his first tournament at the age of 11. It was the second and lowest class of the Icelandic Championship. Some doubted whether it was healthy for such a small boy to play, but his score was quite healthy indeed: 4.5/8, and a shared sixth place among 20 adult players. Just a few months later, around his 12th birthday, he won the second division of the Reykjavik Championship.

Olafsson was among the 20 participants of the first ever international tournament for juniors in Birmingham in 1950. At 15, he was the youngest participant and travelled to England on a fish trawler. Also here, he did remarkably well with a shared fourth place, losing just one game out of 11.

Olafsson won his first Icelandic title in 1952, when he beat Larus Johnsen in a playoff. In the same year, he played his first Olympiad in Helsinki, Finland. Olafsson would represent Iceland in eight Chess Olympiads: 1952-1956, 1962, 1966, 1974, and 1978-1980. He scored a total of 66 points, from 43 wins, 46 draws and 18 losses. 

In 1953, in Esbjerg, Denmark, Olafsson won the Nordic Championship for the first time, finishing with a six-game winning streak. He was eighteen then. It was too early, and the world was too different, to even think about a chess career. Olafsson wanted to do well at school and maybe become a doctor of medicine. (Eventually, in his thirties, he would study Law at the University of Iceland.)

His results did earn him an invitation to the 1953-54 Hastings Tournament. He finished shared fourth; the event was won by C.H.O.D. Alexander and Bronstein. On New Year’s Day 1954, he played and won against Savielly Tartakower, the famous player who was born in 1887.

In 1954 in Amsterdam, his second Olympiad, it was quite sensational when Iceland qualified for the A Final, among the top 12 nations in the world. Olafsson, at 19, held strong players such as Max Euwe, Wolfgang Unzicker, Ludek Pachmann, Gideon Stahlberg, and David Bronstein to a draw. In 1962, in Varna, he was already a very strong grandmaster and won the individual gold medal on board one.

The 1955-56 Hastings Tournament saw Olafsson’s international breakthrough. Again traveling by boat, he arrived in late December in Hastings with his friend Ingi Johansson, who had joined him as a second and reporter. Due to the Christmas holidays, all accommodation was fully booked and the two Icelanders ended up sleeping in a jail cell for one night. But in the first round, Olafsson beat the strong Soviet grandmaster Taimanov on his way to sharing tournament victory with Korchnoi, on 7.5/9. 

His next event was in 1956 in Iceland, a match part of what would be a long-time rivalry in the Nordic countries, between Olafsson and Larsen. There was quite an interest with up to eight hundred spectators inside, a further two hundred following the games via a large demonstration board, and Icelandic radio broadcasting the moves every half hour. Both were twenty years old and, perhaps because of the home-soil pressure, Olafsson lost 3.5-4.5. Later in the year, he was awarded the International Master title for his strong recent results.

Olafsson’s fame rose when he managed to qualify for the 1959 Candidates Tournament. He did so by sharing fifth place with Fischer at Portoroz 1958, an event during which he was awarded the grandmaster title by FIDE. In his first game as a grandmaster, still at the same tournament, he defeated the strong Soviet GM Averbakh.

“I think everybody, players and spectators alike, was pleased to see Icelandic grandmaster Fridrik Olafsson qualify for the Candidates. He is such a fine player, and his games are all imbued with such a beautiful style that one cannot well imagine a representative tournament without him,” wrote Harry Golombek in the British Chess Magazine.

In that 1959 Candidates, won by Tal in then-Yugoslavia (Tal ended up beating Mikhail Botvinnik in the title match in 1960), Olafsson didn’t score particularly well. He did beat Fischer in an exciting game, using a favorite opening weapon of his young opponent, who was a sensation as a 15-year-old world championship candidate. Olafsson would also beat Petrosian and Keres in this tournament.

About the win against Petrosian, chess historian Golombek wrote: “A giant demonstration board had been erected, and a crowd of 5,000 assembled to watch. Olafsson won, to great acclamations. When he tried to go back to the hotel, the crowd insisted on carrying him on their shoulders.”

Olafsson had, by the way, started that year 1959 well, winning the famous Hoogovens Tournament in Beverwijk, the Netherlands. He would play there six more times, and score one more victory in 1976, shared with GM Ljubomir Ljubojevic.

He also started well in the next world championship cycle, winning the Zonal tournament in Berg en Dal, the Netherlands at the end of 1960. When another Zonal was held for the same cycle in 1961 in Marianske Lazne, Czech Republic, which he was eligible to play, he decided to do so and won that one as well. He was undefeated for 24 games in these two events.

Olafsson’s first-round game against Petrosian in the 1962 Interzonal in Stockholm may have been quite a fateful one for the latter. Olafsson was winning, but spoiled it in time trouble – alas, a recurring theme for him – and even lost. The Icelandic GM didn’t make it to the Candidates this time, while Petrosian would end up winning this cycle to become the ninth world champion. 

At home, the result was perhaps for the better: Olafsson had married Audus Juliusdottir earlier that year, and in the summer their first of two daughters was born. The Icelandic GM was now a semi-professional player, with the Icelandic state providing him a half-time salary. Nonetheless, he spent most of his time in the coming years in Reykjavik with his family and due to his legal studies.

He did participate in the first Piatigorsky Cup in 1963 in Los Angeles, the strongest tournament on U.S. soil since New York 1927. It was sponsored by the wealthy couple Gregor (a famous cellist) and Jacqueline (nee Rothschild) Piatigorsky, a chess player, author, and sculptor. Olafsson finished in third place, behind Keres and Petrosian, and beat Benko in a “typical attacking game,” as Timman described it.

Only five and a half years later, after obtaining his law degree, Olafsson would play his next tournament abroad, in 1969 in Wijk aan Zee. He finished fifth, behind Botvinnik and Geller (shared winners), Keres, and Portisch.

He hadn’t been completely away from chess in the previous years because a new, bi-annual Icelandic tournament had been born: the Reykjavikur Skakmotid, an event that would later turned into the (now annual) Reykjavik Open. In the 1964 edition, Tal played, alongside e.g. GM Nona Gaprindashvili. Olafsson would play in all these tournaments and would usually do well.

After graduating in 1968, for six years Olafsson would be employed as an officer in the Icelandic Department of Justice and Church. He could still play about two, three tournaments a year. When the first official FIDE rating list was published in 1970, Olafsson was ranked 25th with 2560. (Fischer was on top with 2720, followed by Korchnoi and Spassky with 2660.) In the unpublished rankings of the world’s strongest amateur players, Olafsson was first.

The Alekhine Memorial in Moscow in 1971 was probably the strongest tournament Olafsson played in his career, with Spassky, Karpov, Tal, Korchnoi, Stein, GM Vasily Smyslov, and Bronstein among his opponents. It was too strong for him to play for top places, but his participation was significant for another reason.

Initially, he had planned a tournament in Spain, but when the invitation came in from the Soviets, the Icelandic Chess Federation, already having in mind to organize the Fischer-Spassky match, requested Olafsson to switch plans. Surely his presence in Moscow, and the possibility to convince Spassky to play in Iceland, would be quite beneficial!? The rest is history, as Olafsson might indeed have played a positive role in getting the Match of the Century to Iceland.

Olafsson’s first international tournament after Moscow 1971 was Las Palmas 1974, where he tied for second place. It was his comeback as a professional player and, at 39, not an easy one. It did help that he could profit from the newly established ‘Stormeisteralaun,’ the special state salary for grandmasters, which was on the level of that of a university teacher. In 1975, Iceland got its second grandmaster: Gudmundur Sigurjonsson.

In the same year, Olafsson finished shared second with Spassky in Tallinn behind Paul Keres and then played once again in Las Palmas. It was there where Olafsson played a great game against Tal, with a stunning final move.

After the aforementioned victory at Hoogovens in 1976, he also shared first place in Reykjavik that year, together with rising star Timman. Two years later, in 1978, he still came third in Iceland’s capital, where the chess boom started to show. Olafsson had to concede draws to multiple up-and-coming local players, such as Sigurjonsson, Helgi Olafsson, Jon Arnason, and Margeir Petursson. 15-year-old Johann Hjartarson, a future world championship candidate, was among the participants as well.

In that same year of 1978, Olafsson ran for FIDE President and narrowly won in a race against Gligoric and Narciso Rabell-Mendez from Puerto Rico. At 43, the Icelandic GM succeeded 77-year-old Euwe as leader of the International Chess Federation. He kept the FIDE Secretariat in Amsterdam, which functioned very well under Secretary General Ineke Bakker.

During his time as FIDE President, he could hardly play in tournaments but the 1980 Buenos Aires tournament was a notable exception. It was there, on November 1, that chess history was made, as it was the only time that a reigning FIDE President defeated the reigning world champion in a tournament game.

Olafsson unexpectedly lost the FIDE elections to Florencio Campomanes in 1982. According to Averbakh, who wrote about the matter in his 2011 book Centre-Stage and Behind the Scenes, the reason why he lost support from the Soviet Union and their bloc of federations was probably how he had dealt with the 1981 World Championship match between Karpov and Korchnoi in Merano, Italy. 

Korchnoi had defected from the Soviet Union a few years earlier, and Olafsson had tried in vain to convince the Soviets to free Korchnoi’s wife and son, even postponing the start of the match to continue the negotiations. The regime in Moscow, however, saw Korchnoi as a renegade and a dissident. A year later, at the FIDE Congress, the Soviets hadn’t forgotten about this episode.

As Oystein Brekke pointed out in a book about Olafsson, it was then and there when FIDE lost its innocence, “because many of the winner’s votes were probably bought and paid for.” Such practices have been rumored ever since, and sometimes more than rumored, at subsequent FIDE presidential elections.

Just a month later, in January 1983, Olafsson was back at the board as a participant in Wijk aan Zee. He finished in shared ninth place, and it would be his last serious tournament abroad, apart from the Veterans vs. Women tournaments in the 1990s. There, in the 1993 edition, he defeated another reigning (women’s) world champion: Xie Jun.

Between 1984 and 2005, Olafsson was Secretary General of the Icelandic Parliament. Even so, he continued playing well into the 21st century, such as in the Reykjavik Opens, a rapid match with Larsen in 2003 (Olafsson won 5-3 this time!), the 2007 Euwe Stimulans tournament (from which we have a truly remarkable game below), the 2011 Euwe Memorial, the Nordic Senior Championships, and the World Senior Team Championships. 

In 2008, the Icelandic post issued a stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of Iceland having its first grandmaster in 1958. It showed the final position of Olafsson's game with Fischer from that year. His birthday of January 26 (he turned 90 earlier this year), has also been Iceland’s national Chess Day since 2012. In 2015, Olafsson was declared an Honorary Citizen of Reykjavik.

Olafsson won the Reykjavik Open three times and last participated in 2013. Here’s one more game, from that event, when he was 78 and drew with a top grandmaster.

“A tall blond, somewhat shy, with a quick warm smile. Such was my first impression when I met Fridrik in the Zonal tournament in Berg en Dal in the Netherlands in 1960. Add a quiet and winning personality and you have the master in a nutshell,” said his good friend Svein Johannessen in his birthday greetings to Olafsson in 2005.

“Throughout his career, Fridrik Olafsson carried the reputation of his nation around the world,” wrote Gudni Th. Johannesson, former president of Iceland. “He gained renown for his brilliance at the chessboard, and equally for his refinement and elegance. Thus, Fridrik won the respect and admiration of all Icelanders, as well as vast numbers of chess fans internationally.”

The sad news of Olafsson’s passing came just a couple of days ahead of this year’s Reykjavik Open, which starts on April 9. Instead of honoring his birthday, which was the original plan, Olafsson and his life will be honored. It is too early for a memorial tournament, which will likely come in the future.

“I last spoke to him on Tuesday, about his personal interests and the chess world that he was still following, and he was still making jokes. It all happened very fast,” said Gunnar Bjornsson, President of the Iceland Chess Federation. “It was an honor knowing him and working with him. He was an incredible individual who paved the way for others."

This obiturary couldn’t have been written without Olafsson’s wonderful book The Chess Saga of Fridrik Olafsson co-written by Oystein Brekke and published by Norsk Sjakkforlag in 2021.