András Adorján: The Grandmaster Who Argued Black Is OK
András Adorján once recounted the moment he was invited into a strong 1973 tournament in Luhacovice with no notice at all. Asked if there was a grandmaster norm on offer, he was simply told, "When does it start?" — "Half an hour ago." He played anyway, and the result helped carry him to the grandmaster title that year. It is a fitting origin story for a player whose defining contribution to chess was not a single tournament win but an argument — pursued across three books and a career of proof-by-example — that chess orthodoxy about the second-moving side was simply wrong.
A Name Chosen, Not Given
Adorján was born András Jocha on March 31, 1950, and adopted his mother's maiden name, Adorján, in 1968, entering the record books under the name by which the chess world would come to know him. His rise through the junior ranks was immediate: in 1969 he was runner-up at the World Junior Chess Championship in Stockholm, losing out to a young Anatoly Karpov who would go on to become one of the most dominant world champions in history, and across 1969–1970 he won the European Junior Championship at the Niemeyer Tournament in Groningen.
Into the Elite
Adorján qualified as an International Master in 1970 and earned the grandmaster title in 1973, the same year he shared his first Hungarian Championship. He went on to win the Hungarian title outright in 1984. His strongest individual result on the world stage came at the 1979 Riga Interzonal, where he tied for third place, a finish strong enough to qualify him for the Candidates Tournament — the gauntlet that determines who challenges for the World Championship. He lost his quarter-final Candidates match that year to Robert Hübner, ending his closest brush with the world title picture, though he continued to compete at the top level for years afterward, winning tournaments at Varna in 1972, Luhacovice in 1973, Osijek in 1978, Budapest in 1982, Gjovik in 1983, Esbjerg in 1985, and the New York Open in 1987.
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In 1978, Adorján played a key role in Hungary's gold medal victory at the Chess Olympiad — a landmark result for Hungarian chess, achieved against the backdrop of Soviet teams that had dominated the event for decades. He went on to represent Hungary at three further Olympiads, in 1984, 1986, and 1988, finishing in the top five each time, a record of sustained national-team excellence spanning a decade.
Seconding Champions
Beyond his own results, Adorján worked as a second to both Garry Kasparov and Peter Leko during their World Championship preparations, lending his deep opening knowledge — he was regarded as a leading expert on the Grünfeld Defence — to two different generations of world-championship contenders.
Black Is OK!
Adorján's most lasting contribution to chess, however, was not a game but an idea, developed across a series of books: Black Is OK! in 1989, Black Is Still OK! in 2004, and Black Is OK Forever! in 2005. The thesis ran directly against decades of chess orthodoxy, which held that White's first-move advantage gave the player of the white pieces a durable, provable edge and Black merely fought for equality. Adorján argued instead that Black's position after best play was not merely defensible but fundamentally sound — drawing inspiration from creative, combative players like Tony Miles and Alexander Morozevich, who treated the black pieces as a platform for original, ambitious play rather than passive equalizing technique.
Why András Is Called a Genius
No source calls Adorján a genius outright, but the case for the word rests on something specific and real: he took a piece of near-universal chess dogma — that Black starts every game already fighting from behind — and built a rigorous, book-length counter-argument out of it, one influential enough to be revisited and expanded twice more over sixteen years. That is a genuinely creative act of chess thinking, closer to theoretical reframing than to raw calculation, and it is reinforced by his standing as a trusted second to two different world-championship contenders across two different eras, a role that depends on deep, original opening insight rather than reputation alone. The honest counterweight is that Adorján's own practical results, while excellent — an Olympiad gold, a Candidates berth, multiple Hungarian titles — stopped short of a world title challenge of his own; his idea outlived and outshone his own scoresheet, and the strongest claim on his behalf is as an original theorist and writer rather than as the most successful player of his generation.
Legacy
András Adorján died on May 11, 2023, at age seventy-three, leaving behind a Hungarian Olympiad gold medal, a Candidates Tournament run, and a body of theoretical writing that reframed how a generation of players thought about the black pieces — an argument, made across three books, that chess's oldest assumption about who starts a game at a disadvantage deserved to be challenged.
