Swashbuckler
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So as not to digress in another thread, I thought I would create a new thread about Mir Sultan Khan who surprisingly isnt well known among most Pakistanis. I tried searching for him in the PP Archives but to no avail. If you talk about non cricketers from Pakistan you have the legendary squash players, hockey stars and Great Gama but in my view Mir Sultan Khan deserves equal respect for his achievements despite his enormous life struggles.
I have read about him many times and he is erroneously called as Indian chess master even by well reputed chess historians. It is true that during his playing days he represented British India but subsequently in 1947 along with his family he chose Pakistan and ultimately died in Sargodha in 1966. Very few Pakistanis seem to be aware of this person, even prominent Pakistani news outlets hardly ever carry stories about his playing career or personal life. Unlike other chess masters it is very difficult to decipher his life because of very little material. Edward Winter is a rare chess historian who has managed to dig up information about the great man, he is the biggest source of my information about not just Sultan Khan but many other lesser known players from across the globe who managed to leave imprints on the royal game.
The material about his life is insufficient and also incoherent in some places, but I will try to shed some light on the man to the best of my ability. I know chess may look boring to the uninitiated but believe me it is one of the greatest games with a wonderful heritage. Not just limited to the 16 world champions starting from Steinitz, there are a series of outstanding masters whom the Chess Goddess Caissa can be proud of and Khan occupies one such exalted position.
Sultan Khan was the son of a religious leader in Punjab with a dozen or so siblings. His father who himself was a talented chess player taught his children Indian Chess at a very young age. The Indian system of chess differs from modern chess because there is no castling (interchange of positions of King and Rook) and pawn isnt allowed to move two steps in the first move. This may sound trivial to casual observers but these differences strongly impact opening moves and most of modern chess theory is focused on opening theory. Theoretically there are billions of variations in positions after only a few moves, so you can very well imagine the drawbacks players of the Indian system faced compared to the Western masters who were better exposed to opening repertoire in modern chess courtesy decades of analysis and algorithm making.
There are some gaps in his early life but somehow he came to the notice of a certain Sir Malik Mohammed Umar Hayat Khan who was a large landholder in Punjab and an elected member of the Council of State of India. He organized an all India tournament which Sultan Khan won and after that he took special interest in the young mans life. Since Sultan was illiterate Umar Hayat arranged an English tutor to teach him rudimentary English and English annotations of chess games. After all this he added young Sultan to his coterie of servants and took him to England.
In his first tournament in London he finished dead last because of unfamiliarity with modern chess. He spent time with other players and learnt from his experiences, slowly getting better with every passing tournament, ultimately winning the British Championship in 1929 (he went on to win it twice again in his short career). British Championship wasnt as prestigious as equivalent events in Soviet Union, USA, Hungary, France, Germany etc but in the Commonwealth it was unquestionably the strongest event. These triumphs made others notice him and he got many invitations to prestigious events.
He played many tournaments in the next couple of years. Not going into all the details but in this period he managed to beat Marshall, Rubinstein, Flohr, Tartakower etc, all top players of that era. But his shining moment came in Hastings 1930 when he scored a fine victory over Jose Raul Capablanca, the 3rd World Champion from Cuba who is regarded as one of the most perfect players of all time. Beating a world champion is a milestone but Khan did it in spite of being handicapped in the opening theory where he was behind the other players by a few decades at least .Opening theory was largely empirical and his enormous chess aptitude couldnt help him overcome that shortcoming. His middlegame and endgame abilities however were extraordinary and Capablanca called him a genius, an honour he rarely bestowed upon his peers. His H2H against the great players from that era may look unflattering but if you factor in his origins, background and illiteracy the very fact that he got so many big scalps and even touched world ranking of 8 at one point cant be understated. Not to forget that in his free time he was running errands and doing domestic chores for his master,
His chess career lasted less than seven years, most of the time spent in Europe. He returned to present day Pakistan in 1933 and never played another competitive chess game in his life. He hated his stint in England because of the damp cold climate. He frequently suffered bouts of illness there and when he finally returned home he told his sister that he had been freed from prison. Sir Umar abandoned him, furious that his ward had not lived up to his expectations. Sultan Khan spent the rest of his life in poverty and frustration, he never even taught his children the game. He died as an unknown entity, not mourned either by the chess world or the Pakistani government and public.
Rueben Fine was a legendary American chess GM, in fact an all round genius. He was one of the greatest thinkers of the game (also human psychology) and the current WC Magnus Carlsen idolizes him. In his book this is what he wrote about Khan:
This particular passage just illustrates how bad we were (and still are) at maximizing our talent. I can see a parallel between Khan and Ramanujam but the latter achieved a greater standing in his field thanks to his English mentor Hardy and his association with the Cambridge Mathematics Department. Unfortunately Khan had no such mentor to get the best out of him, doubly sad that he is a forgotten figure today.
I have read about him many times and he is erroneously called as Indian chess master even by well reputed chess historians. It is true that during his playing days he represented British India but subsequently in 1947 along with his family he chose Pakistan and ultimately died in Sargodha in 1966. Very few Pakistanis seem to be aware of this person, even prominent Pakistani news outlets hardly ever carry stories about his playing career or personal life. Unlike other chess masters it is very difficult to decipher his life because of very little material. Edward Winter is a rare chess historian who has managed to dig up information about the great man, he is the biggest source of my information about not just Sultan Khan but many other lesser known players from across the globe who managed to leave imprints on the royal game.
The material about his life is insufficient and also incoherent in some places, but I will try to shed some light on the man to the best of my ability. I know chess may look boring to the uninitiated but believe me it is one of the greatest games with a wonderful heritage. Not just limited to the 16 world champions starting from Steinitz, there are a series of outstanding masters whom the Chess Goddess Caissa can be proud of and Khan occupies one such exalted position.
Sultan Khan was the son of a religious leader in Punjab with a dozen or so siblings. His father who himself was a talented chess player taught his children Indian Chess at a very young age. The Indian system of chess differs from modern chess because there is no castling (interchange of positions of King and Rook) and pawn isnt allowed to move two steps in the first move. This may sound trivial to casual observers but these differences strongly impact opening moves and most of modern chess theory is focused on opening theory. Theoretically there are billions of variations in positions after only a few moves, so you can very well imagine the drawbacks players of the Indian system faced compared to the Western masters who were better exposed to opening repertoire in modern chess courtesy decades of analysis and algorithm making.
There are some gaps in his early life but somehow he came to the notice of a certain Sir Malik Mohammed Umar Hayat Khan who was a large landholder in Punjab and an elected member of the Council of State of India. He organized an all India tournament which Sultan Khan won and after that he took special interest in the young mans life. Since Sultan was illiterate Umar Hayat arranged an English tutor to teach him rudimentary English and English annotations of chess games. After all this he added young Sultan to his coterie of servants and took him to England.
In his first tournament in London he finished dead last because of unfamiliarity with modern chess. He spent time with other players and learnt from his experiences, slowly getting better with every passing tournament, ultimately winning the British Championship in 1929 (he went on to win it twice again in his short career). British Championship wasnt as prestigious as equivalent events in Soviet Union, USA, Hungary, France, Germany etc but in the Commonwealth it was unquestionably the strongest event. These triumphs made others notice him and he got many invitations to prestigious events.
He played many tournaments in the next couple of years. Not going into all the details but in this period he managed to beat Marshall, Rubinstein, Flohr, Tartakower etc, all top players of that era. But his shining moment came in Hastings 1930 when he scored a fine victory over Jose Raul Capablanca, the 3rd World Champion from Cuba who is regarded as one of the most perfect players of all time. Beating a world champion is a milestone but Khan did it in spite of being handicapped in the opening theory where he was behind the other players by a few decades at least .Opening theory was largely empirical and his enormous chess aptitude couldnt help him overcome that shortcoming. His middlegame and endgame abilities however were extraordinary and Capablanca called him a genius, an honour he rarely bestowed upon his peers. His H2H against the great players from that era may look unflattering but if you factor in his origins, background and illiteracy the very fact that he got so many big scalps and even touched world ranking of 8 at one point cant be understated. Not to forget that in his free time he was running errands and doing domestic chores for his master,
His chess career lasted less than seven years, most of the time spent in Europe. He returned to present day Pakistan in 1933 and never played another competitive chess game in his life. He hated his stint in England because of the damp cold climate. He frequently suffered bouts of illness there and when he finally returned home he told his sister that he had been freed from prison. Sir Umar abandoned him, furious that his ward had not lived up to his expectations. Sultan Khan spent the rest of his life in poverty and frustration, he never even taught his children the game. He died as an unknown entity, not mourned either by the chess world or the Pakistani government and public.
Rueben Fine was a legendary American chess GM, in fact an all round genius. He was one of the greatest thinkers of the game (also human psychology) and the current WC Magnus Carlsen idolizes him. In his book this is what he wrote about Khan:
This particular passage just illustrates how bad we were (and still are) at maximizing our talent. I can see a parallel between Khan and Ramanujam but the latter achieved a greater standing in his field thanks to his English mentor Hardy and his association with the Cambridge Mathematics Department. Unfortunately Khan had no such mentor to get the best out of him, doubly sad that he is a forgotten figure today.
