Rafael Vaganian at 75: The Armenian Who Reached No. 4

Rafael Vaganian was born on 15 October 1951 in Yerevan, and turns 75 this week. His career spans the Soviet school, the post-Soviet scramble and a long second life in German club chess. Few players of his generation have been seen at so many levels of the game.

A prodigy in a crowded year group

His father, a physicist and keen player, taught him chess at five. As a boy Vaganian beat former world champion Max Euwe in a clock simultaneous in 1965, and at 16 he was Soviet school champion.

At 18 he won an international youth tournament in Groningen, level on points with Karl-Heinz Maeder of Germany and Zoltan Ribli of Hungary. In those years he was ranked alongside Anatoly Karpov, of the same age, and Mikhail Steinberg, who died young, as one of the USSR’s greatest talents.

Karpov’s path is well known. Vaganian’s was different: he was a top-ten level player for years rather than a world champion, and his reputation rests on consistency.

A title without the usual steps

After winning a strong grandmaster tournament in Vrnjacka Banja in 1971, ahead of Leonid Stein, Ljubomir Ljubojevic and Borislav Ivkov, he was awarded the grandmaster title directly by FIDE. He was 20 and had never held the international master title. He was the first Armenian to receive it, which is why the usual route to the title does not describe his case.

For decades he was Armenia’s strongest player. His USSR Championship record included joint 3rd-5th in 1974, joint 2nd-5th in 1975 and joint 3rd-4th in 1982/83, before he won the title outright in 1989.

The mid-1980s peak

Vaganian’s best years were 1984 to 1986. His peak rating was 2645 in January 1986, which put him fourth in the world behind Kasparov, Karpov and Timman. In that stretch he won the 1985 Interzonal in Biel, his biggest tournament success.

At the Candidates tournament in Montpellier he finished joint first with Artur Yusupov and Andrei Sokolov on the same score. He then lost the first knockout round to Sokolov. In the next cycle he reached the Candidates matches again, in Saint John in 1988, and was eliminated by Lajos Portisch.

Days later in Saint John he was runner-up in the World Blitz Championship, losing the final match to Mikhail Tal. He also lost 1½-2½ to Zoltan Ribli on board five in the 1984 USSR v. Rest of the World match.

Tournament wins and Olympiad medals

The list of his tournament victories is long: Rome and São Paulo in 1977, Las Palmas 1979, Manila 1981, Hastings 1982/83, Tallinn 1983 and Lvov 1984. Later came Marseille and Leningrad in 1987, Toronto 1990, Long Beach and the World Open in Philadelphia in 1994, and the 1995 Aeroflot Open in Moscow. In 2004 he finished level with winner Sergei Rublevsky at Aeroflot.

At Olympiads he debuted for the USSR in Buenos Aires in 1978, where Hungary pushed the Soviets into an unusual silver. He won team gold in 1984 and 1986. In Thessaloniki in 1984 he took individual gold on board three and had the second-best performance rating, behind John Nunn.

From 1992 to 2004 he played for independent Armenia, winning team bronze in 1992 and 2004 and individual board-three gold in 2004.

Germany and the Bundesliga

From 1990 he played for SG Porz in the Bundesliga and won six championship titles with the club through 2007. In 1996/97 he scored 14½ from 15, the best result ever recorded by a player in a single Bundesliga season. He and his family lived in Porz from 1992 for many years.

That German tie persists. Last year he co-commentated the Sparkassen Chess Meeting in Dortmund with Yusupov, his old Montpellier co-leader.

Still at the board

In 2016 he won silver with Armenia at the World Senior Team Championship, and in 2019 he took gold at the World Senior Championship in the 65+ category. Since 2016 he has directed the Shengavit Youth Chess School in Yerevan. He still plays online tournaments, though not as successfully as before.