Arturo Pomar

Arturo Pomar: The Boy Who Held the World Champion

Gijón, 1944. On one side of the board sat Alexander Alekhine, the reigning world chess champion, a man who had held the title for most of two decades. On the other sat a thirteen-year-old Spanish boy known to the newspapers as Arturito. Seventy-odd moves later the game was drawn — and not because the champion had been merciful. Pomar had outplayed him in the endgame and reached a theoretically winning position before letting it slip. He remains, more than eighty years on, the youngest player ever to draw with a reigning world champion at a normal time control. The record still stands.

Arturito

Arturo Pomar Salamanca was born on 1 September 1931 in Palma de Mallorca. He was a prodigy in the strict sense: at ten he finished runner-up in the Championship of the Balearic Isles, and the following year he won it outright. In October 1943, aged twelve, he made his international debut at Madrid, where he narrowly avoided last place and defeated Friedrich Sämisch, a player of grandmaster strength and one of the most respected theoreticians in Europe.

Spain, at that moment, had almost nothing else to celebrate in the way of international sporting achievement, and the boy became famous. He gave radio interviews. He appeared in films. Comparisons were made — inevitably and, for a while, plausibly — to Paul Morphy, José Raúl Capablanca and Sammy Reshevsky, the three names that constitute the standard vocabulary for chess prodigies.

Alekhine himself took an interest. Visiting Spain and Portugal after the Second World War, the world champion gave the boy chess lessons and devoted part of his 1946 book *Legado!* to him. Whatever else can be said about Alekhine, he did not lavish attention on children for public relations reasons. He thought there was something there.

Champion of Spain

There was. Pomar won the Spanish Championship for the first time in 1946, at fifteen, and went on to win it six more times: in 1950, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1962 and 1966. He was runner-up on four further occasions — 1951, 1956, 1964 and 1969 — and the combined record stood unsurpassed until Miguel Illescas overtook it in 2010, more than four decades later.

FIDE awarded him the international master title in 1950 and the grandmaster title in 1962, making him the first Spaniard to hold it. He played for Spain at twelve consecutive Chess Olympiads, occupying first board for most of them, and won an individual bronze medal at Leipzig in 1960 with a score of five wins, no losses and seven draws. His Olympiad service ran from 1958 in Munich to La Valletta in 1980 — twenty-two years of representing his country at the highest level of team chess.

Zonals, Interzonals, and the Ceiling

His best international results came in a concentrated run around the turn of the 1960s. At the Madrid Zonal of 1960 he shared first place with Svetozar Gligorić, Jan Hein Donner and Lajos Portisch — three of the strongest players in Europe. At Torremolinos in 1961 he finished first alongside Gligorić. At Málaga in 1964 he won outright, ahead of Portisch. At Palma de Mallorca in 1966, on his native island, he finished second behind Mikhail Tal and again ahead of Portisch. He won at Málaga once more in 1971.

The qualification from Madrid carried him to the Interzonal at Stockholm in 1962 — the tournament from which the challengers for the world championship emerged, and the closest Pomar came to that path. He finished equal eleventh. The winner was a nineteen-year-old American named Bobby Fischer.

The Breakdowns

The phrase that recurs in accounts of Pomar's career is that he never quite fulfilled his early promise, and the reason is not mysterious. He suffered at least two nervous breakdowns while attending tournaments. At Mariánské Lázně in 1965 he completed only nine of his fifteen games and finished with a share of last place. At Dundee in 1967 he withdrew having completed fewer than half his games, and his score was cancelled from the record. He made a good recovery, but his later play and results were affected by the experience.

It is worth stating plainly what this means. A boy who had been a national celebrity at twelve, who had drawn with a world champion at thirteen, and who had been publicly measured against Capablanca, spent his adult career carrying an expectation that no result short of the world title could satisfy. He stopped playing serious events around 1985.

The Writer

Pomar also worked in the other tradition available to Spanish-speaking masters: he wrote. His instructional books include *Mis cincuenta partidas con maestros* (1945), published when he was fourteen; *Temas de ajedrez* (1956); *Las pequeñas ventajas en el final* (1958); *Ajedrez* (1962); *El arte de ver la ventaja* (1968); and *Ajedrez elemental* (1971), written with the Soviet master Vasily Panov. Several generations of Spanish players learned the endgame from a man who had been taught by Alekhine.

Why Arturo Is Called a Genius

Pomar's claim is the cleanest in this company and also the most poignant, because it rests almost entirely on what he did before he was fourteen. Drawing with a reigning world champion at thirteen, at classical time control, is a record that has survived eight decades of chess prodigies including Fischer, Kasparov and Carlsen, none of whom matched it. And it was no swindle: he outplayed Alekhine in the endgame and reached a winning position before inexact play let it slip. That is not luck. It is a child perceiving, correctly, more about a complex position than the best player in the world.

The counter-case is the whole of the rest of his life, and honesty requires it. Pomar became a very strong grandmaster — Spain's first, seven times national champion, an Olympiad medallist, a zonal winner over Gligorić and Portisch — and never became a world-class one. His single Interzonal produced an equal-eleventh finish. He never played a Candidates tournament. Two breakdowns at the board interrupted him at the age when players consolidate, and he never recovered the trajectory that Alekhine's interest had implied.

So the word applies to the prodigy more securely than to the professional. What Pomar had at thirteen was raw positional perception of a kind that appears perhaps once a generation; what he did not acquire was the temperament, or perhaps merely the circumstances, to convert it. Spanish chess called him a genius from the moment he was twelve and never stopped. The record justifies the phrase for the boy at Gijón. For the man who followed, it justifies something quieter and still rare: mastery, endured for forty years under the weight of what he had once been.

Legacy

Pomar died on 26 May 2016 in Barcelona, after a long illness. In his last years he had served as a guest of honour at chess events, most fittingly at the 2004 Chess Olympiad in Calvià, held on the island where he was born. In 2016, following a proposal from the Association of Chess Professionals, FIDE recognised his contribution to chess history with a special prize. He was Spain's first grandmaster and, for a decade, its most famous sportsman — and he owns a record that the greatest players of the century have all failed to take from him.