Pan Inspector: A Chess Biography of Yuri Sakharov

Yuri Sakharov (1922-1981) was a leading Ukrainian chess player and coach from the 1950s until his death, ranked the world number 17 in 1968 according to Chessmetrics. Although little-known in the West as he rarely played outside the Soviet Union, he qualified for six Soviet championship finals, with a highest position of joint sixth in 1967. Sakharov won the Ukrainian Championship twice and deployed many opening novelties in his time. As he aged he increasingly turned to correspondence chess, where he won gold medals at the ICCF Olympiads as a member of the Soviet team in 1972 and 1976. As we see in this book, he went toe-to-toe with greats such as Tal, Smyslov, Bronstein, Keres, Polugaevsky, Taimanov, Geller, Averbakh, Stein, Ivkov and Kotov among many others. He started out as a primarily attacking player whose games often involved the Sicilian (especially the Najdorf variation), King’s Indian and Ruy Lopez openings, but he later evolved into a more universal player with strong positional skills.