Tags: Chess Player.
Wolfgang Unzicker (26 June 1925 – 20 April 2006) was one of the strongest German chess Grandmasters from 1945 to about 1970.He decided against making chess his profession choosing law instead.Unzicker was at times the world’s strongest amateur chess player and World Champion Anatoly Karpov called him the world champion of amateurs.Unzicker was born in Pirmasens a small town near Kaiserslautern in the province of Rhineland-Palatinate.His father taught him how to play chess at age 10.His brother four years older was also a chess player but was killed in World War II.Unzicker began to play tournaments abroad in 1948 as Germany was struggling to rebuild after the war and achieved the grandmaster title in 1954.He won the German Championship six times from 1948 to 1963 and tied for first in 1965.From 1950 to 1978 Unzicker played in twelve Chess Olympiads and was first board on ten of them.He played nearly 400 times representing Germany’s national team.For many years he was legal advisor for the German Chess Association.His tournament victories include the first place tie (+6 −0 =9) with Boris Spassky at the Chigorin Memorial in Sochi 1965 first at Maribor 1967 ahead of Samuel Reshevsky first at Krems and first at Amsterdam 1980 tied with Hans Ree.
