Today would be Lothar Schmid‘s 92nd birthday. He probably best remembered as the arbiter of the 1972 World Championship match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer but he was also a strong grandmaster who played in 11 Olympiads. I had the good fortune to meet him in 1992 when he was arbiter at Bobby Fischer’s return match against Spassky in Yugoslavia. One story he told stuck with me. When he was a teenager and the war was going badly for Germany such they were so desperately short of manpower, he was drafted into some sort of local guard duty in a forest near his home. One night the sky was ablaze and he thought there was a massive forest fire. It was the firebombing of Dresden some 70 kilometers away.
Schmid’s career included wins against Bogolyubow, Keres, Botvinnik, Bronstein, Benko. Reshevsky, Browne, and many others. But since this feature is limited to games that you won’t find on ChessBase’s MegaBase, I won’t show you any of those games. Instead, this week’s game is an interesting struggle against International Master Antonio Medina García from the 1963 Malaga tournament.
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