Svetozar Gligorić (Serbian Cyrillic: Светозар Глигорић; 2 February 1923 – 14 August 2012) was a Serbian and Yugoslav chess grandmaster and musician. He won a record 11 titles at Yugoslav Chess Championship, a record 12 team medals at Chess Olympiad, and is considered the best player ever from Serbia and Yugoslavia. In 1958, he received the Golden Badge award for the best athlete of Yugoslavia.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Gligorić was one of the top players in the world reaching the Candidates Tournament three times (1953, 1959, 1968). In his career he won both team (1950) and individual board 1 (1958) gold medals at the Chess Olympiad thus becoming one of the few players in chess history to do so (along with Kashdan, Rubinstein, Botvinnik, Petrosian, Spassky, Karpov, Korchnoi, Kasparov, Ivanchuk, Aronian, Ding and Gukesh).
He was also among the world's most popular players, owing to his globe-trotting tournament schedule and a particularly engaging personality, reflected in the title of his autobiography book, I Play Against Pieces (i.e., without hostility toward the opponent; playing "the board and not the man").
Gligorić was born in Belgrade to a poor family. According to his recollections, his first exposure to chess was as a small child watching patrons play in a neighborhood bar. He began to play at the age of eleven, when taught by a boarder taken in by his mother (his father had died by this time). Lacking a chess set, he made one for himself by carving pieces from corks from wine bottles—a story paralleling the formative years of his contemporary, the renowned Estonian grandmaster Paul Keres.
Gligorić was a good student during his youth, with both academic and athletic successes that famously led to him to be invited to represent his school at a birthday celebration for Prince Peter, who later became King Peter II of Yugoslavia. He later recounted to International Master David Levy (who chronicled his chess career in The Chess of Gligoric) his distress at attending this gala event wearing poor clothing stemming from his family's impoverished condition. His first tournament success came in 1938 when he won the Belgrade Chess Club championship; however, World War II interrupted his chess progress for a time. During the war, Gligorić was a member of a partisan unit. A chance encounter with a chess-playing partisan officer led to his removal from combat. Following the death of his parents, he was adopted in 1940 at the age of 17 by Niko Miljanić.
Following World War II, Gligorić worked for several years as a journalist and organizer of chess tournaments eventually making the transition to full-time chess professional. He continued to progress as a player and in the year of introduction of FIDE titles (1950) he was awarded the International Master title. A year later, Gligorić became a Grandmaster, thus becoming the second Serb to receive this title, after Boris Kostić (1950).
During the 1950s and 1960s, Gligorić was one of the world's strongest players, with a number of tournament victories to his credit, three participations in the Candidates tournaments and a record 11 Yugoslav chess championships in 1947 (joint), 1948 (joint), 1949, 1950, 1956, 1957, 1958 (joint), 1959, 1960, 1963 and 1966. Thanks to his personality, Gligorić became a lifelong friend of many well-known and skilled chess players such as Bobby Fischer, Tigran Petrosian, Efim Geller, Mikhail Botvinnik, Mikhail Tal and Miguel Najdorf.
He represented his native Yugoslavia with great success in fifteen Chess Olympiads between 1950 and 1982 (thirteen times on first board). In the first post-World War II Olympiad, on home soil at Dubrovnik 1950, Gligorić played on board 1 and led Yugoslavia to a historic result, the team gold medal.
This was during a golden age of Serbian chess, a period when Yugoslavia (led by Serbian grandmasters like Gligorić, Ivkov, Trifunović, Matanović, Matulović, Ljubojević etc.) was among the top three chess countries in the world which led to Gligorić becoming the man with the most team medals in the history of the Chess Olympiad (12). His best individual result was the gold medal on board 1 at the 1958 Olympiad in Munich ahead of reigning world champion Mikhail Botvinnik and former world champion Max Euwe. With this medal Gligorić became one of only 13 players with both team and individual board 1 gold medals at Chess Olympiad.
On top of that, he was very successful at European championship as well winning 6 team medals and 5 board medals, including individual board 1 gold medal that he won in 1973 together with Boris Spassky.
His list of first-place finishes in international chess competitions is one of the longest and includes such events as Liberation Tournament 1945/46 (ahead of Milan Vidmar), Warsaw 1947 (ahead of Smyslov and Boleslavsky), Mar del Plata 1950 and 1953 (ahead of the entire silver medal winning Argentina 1952 Olympic team: Najdorf, Bolbochan, Eliskases, Pilnik and Rossetto), Stockholm 1954, Dallas 1957 (tied with Reshevsky, ahead of Szabo, Larsen and Najdorf), Belgrade 1962 (ahead of Ivkov) and 1969 (tied with Ivkov and Polugaevsky ahead of Geller and Botvinnik), Tel Aviv 1966, Manila 1968, Lone Pine (California) 1972 and 1979, Staunton Memorial 1951, Sarajevo 1962 (tied with Portisch), Los Angeles 1974 and many others. He was also a regular competitor in the series of great tournaments held at Hastings, with wins (or ties for first) in 1951–52, 1956–57, 1959–60, 1960–61 and 1962–63. His five wins and shared wins at Hastings remains a record for the event.
Some other notable results include second place in Buenos Aires 1955 (behind Ivkov, ahead of Pilnik and Szabo), Hastings 1957/58 (behind Paul Keres), Zurich 1959 (ahead of Keres and Fischer but ½ point behind Tal), Hastings 1961/62 (behind Botvinnik), Reykjavik 1964 (behind Tal), great tournament in Zagreb 1970 (ahead of Petrosian, tied with Smyslov, Korchnoi and Hort, behind Fischer), Vinkovci 1970 (behind Larsen, tied with Bronstein and Hort, ahead of Petrosian and Taimanov), and Wijk aan Zee 1971 (tied with Petrosian, behind Korchnoi). Gligorić was also third in Mar del Plata 1955, very strong Bled 1961 tournament (ahead of Geller and Najdorf, tied with Keres and Petrosian, behing Fischer and Tal) and Havana 1952 (behind Najdorf and Reshevsky), as well as fourth in Capablanca Memorial 1962 (tied with Smyslov, behind Najdorf, Spassky and Polugaevsky), Belgrade 1964 (behind Spassky, Korchnoi and Ivkov, ahead of Larsen, Matanović and Bronstein), San Antionio 1972 (ahead of Keres and Hort, behind Portisch, Karpov and Petrosian), Amsterdam 1950 (ahead of Pilnik, Euwe and Tartakower, tied with Pirc, behind Najdorf, Reshevsky and Stahlberg) and in the 1956 Alekhine Memorial Tournament held in Moscow. Sixteen leading grandmasters took part in this prestigious tournament, which made Gligorić's result even more valuable. The fact that Gligorić finished behind Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov and Mark Taimanov, but ahead of David Bronstein, Miguel Najdorf and Paul Keres lead Bronstein to claim that Gligorić was one of the top three players in the world at that moment.
His record in world championship qualifying events was mixed. He was a regular competitor in Zonal and Interzonal competitions with several successes, e.g. zonal wins in 1951, 1960 (joint), 1963, 1966, and 1969 (joint) and 8 participations in the interzonal tournaments between 1948 and 1973 with his best result coming in 1958 when he was 2nd, half a point behind the future world champion, Mikhail Tal. During this period, the Serbian grandmaster missed only one of these tournaments in 1955. Successful performances at interzonal level in 1952, 1958 and 1967 enabled him to participate in Candidates Tournaments the following years. He wasn't able to win any of those Candidates events, however, finishing 13th in the 1953, 5th in 1959 and with 3½–5½ loss against Mikhail Tal in the quarterfinals of the 1968 Candidates match series.
Two years later, in 1970, Gligorić participated in one of the greatest chess events of all time, The Match of the Century – USSR versus the Rest of the World. That year, Belgrade gathered literally all the best players in the world from both sides of the Iron Curtain, among them Gligorić, who played on the fifth board for Team World. The Soviets, more difficult than expected, confirmed their superiority with a score of 20½–19½.