Hans Berliner, born on January 27, 1929, in Berlin, Germany. At eight his family moved to America to escape Nazi persecution. Hans learned chess at age 13, and the game quickly became his main preoccupation. He was described by Carlos Fuentes as "an extremely brilliant boy, with a brilliant mathematical mind". He was talented at all aspects of chess, and as a teenager gave a blindfold simultaneous exhibition at the Washington Chess Divan, winning all six games against top local players. In 1949 he became a Master, in 1953 the New York State Champion, and in 1956 the winner of the Eastern States Open, ahead of William Lombardy, Nicolas Rossolimo and Bobby Fischer (at age 13).
In 1952 Berliner played for the US at the Helsinki Olympiad, and then in the US Championship four times. In 1954 he scored 6½/13 to tie 8–9th places, and the last three times Fischer won the tournament. Mega Database has 79 games by Berliner, against Fine, R. Byrne, Evans, Bisguier, Lombardy, Mednis, Denker, Reshevsky, Rossolimo and four against Fischer (who defeated him 3½:½).
Berliner returned to school in 1969 and graduated in 1974 with a thesis entitled "Chess as Problem Solving: The Development of a Tactics Analyzer." He went on to become a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He was an International Master in over-the-board chess, and grandmaster of Correspondence Chess. From 1965-1968 he was the World Correspondence Chess Champion. He died on Friday in Riviera Beach, Florida, at the age of 87. His death was confirmed by Carl Ebeling, a former student who retired in 2012 as a computer science professor at the University of Washington.
An excellent eulogy of Hans Berliner appeared in the Monday edition of the New York Times, written by ever vigilant chess correspondent Dylan Loeb McClain.
Hans Berliner won the Fifth World Correspondence Chess Championship, which began in 1965 and lasted three years. His margin of victory in the final was the largest in history: his final score was 14.0/16 (twelve wins, four draws), three points ahead of any opponent. But it was his game against Yakov Estrin, a Russian correspondence grandmaster that followers of chess remember. McClain writes:
Mr. Berliner, playing Black, essayed the Two Knights Defense, one of the more complicated openings. For many months, the players traded what would be described as haymakers in boxing, with each attacking, only to be met with a counterattack. After an incredible series of moves, the game wound down to a rook-and-pawn ending that Mr. Berliner won.
Andy Soltis, a grandmaster of over-the-board (conventional) play, ranked the game No. 1 in his book “The 100 Best Chess Games of the 20th Century” (2000). Over the years, the game was often analyzed by people using increasingly powerful chess computers, but only a few small improvements in the moves of both players were ever found.
In a 2004 lecture entitled "The greatest chess game ever played" Playchess.com trainer Dennis Monokroussos gave the award to Estrin-Berliner from the 5th Correspondence World Chess Championship. Monokroussos wrote:
"Hans Berliner, on his way to the title, produces a fearsome novelty against future correspondence champion Yakov Estrin in the latter’s specialty, the Two Knights Defense. Berliner’s opening idea was so deep that it is still debated to this day, and needless to say, Estrin could not even begin to solve everything, even under the relatively leisurely time controls afforded by correspondence chess. Instead, he tried to bail out to a drawn ending via a long forcing sequence. Here too, Berliner was a step ahead of him, capping off the crown jewel of his correspondence career with a beautifully played – and instructive – rook ending. This is a game not to be missed: it possesses opening theory you can use, beautiful endgame technique, and complications to suit even the most discriminating tactical connoisseur. Check it out, bring your friends (except those who play the Italian game against you), and prepare yourself for a feast!"
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Here's the famous game for you to analyse, enjoy – and to learn from. It is annotated by IM Sagar Shah who, as a young lad, read Hans Berliner's book The System: A World Champion's Approach to Chess. It lays out a set of principles that Berliner used to guide him to the right moves. Readers will be astonished by the simplicity and power of Berliner's methods as he takes several major openings and subjects them to System principles, and finds radically new approaches to them. Sagar: "At the time this book had a deep impact on me. The author suggested lines and variations with an aim to proving that White can win all the games if his system is followed. To that end, he recommended 1.d4! as the best move!" |
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"Best correspondence chess game ever played": Estrin vs Berliner, 1965
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Addendum: a chess legend passes...Former Junior World Champion Julio Kaplan wrote us: Meeting Hans remains one of my fondest chess memories. I was a teenager living in Puerto Rico at the time, and Hans was vacationing in the island. He visited the chess club, we got to talking, and he showed me his analysis of the Estrin endgame – something like a year before the whole thing played out, exactly as he analyzed! He stopped at critical points and posed them as puzzles, and I still remember my excitement at working through his ideas. I always loved endgames, and also went on to produce chess computers. In retrospect, this meeting with Hans influenced my life more than I ever realized at the time. |
There is another aspect to Hans Berliner's life that is important: he was a expert in computer chess, and one of the great pioneers of hardware chess machines.
Hans Berliner and his student Carl Ebeling at Carnegie Mellon University, in 1985 [Photo Bill Redick]
The Hitech chess machine was designed in the late 1980s by Carl Ebeling. The custom hardware could analyze 200,000 moves per second and was the first computer to be rated over 2400.
Hans Berliner (background) at a computer chess tournament. In the forground are his student Murray Campbell with Feng-hsiung Hsu. The two went on to develop Deep Blue for IBM.
Hans Berliner at a computer chess championship. Next to him is his student Murray Campbell, opposite him Robert Hyatt of Cray Blitz and Tony Scherzer, author of the program Bebe. Behind Berliner are computer experts (and IMs) David Levy and Mike Valvo.
The full story about Hans Berliner's work in computer chess has to be kept for another day.
