Reuben Fine was one of the greatest chess players in the world from mid 1930 to the 1940s. He was an expert in both psychology and chess. At age eight, young Fine learned to play and began playing at the famous Marshall Chess Club in NYC. After much practice, Fine became a blitz chess expert, becoming one of the best in the world as a young adult. He was able to hold his own in blitz chess against Alekhine, the then world chess champion. Even before Fine reached adulthood, he won a U.S. Open Chess Championship at Minneapolis in 1932, scoring half a point ahead of Samuel Reshevsky. Fine went on to win six more U.S. Open Chess Championships.
After winning the U.S. Team Selection tournament in New York, Fine was able to represent the US in chess Olympiads, winning five medals (including 3 gold medals in team competitions).
During WWII, world championship matches were withheld, leaving Fine to pursue different goals. He played a few serious American events and won, but found that money spent on chess wins were difficult to find. Fine instead pursued writing as a way of earning his living, writing Basic Chess Endings, a book that has been considered one of the best works on endgame analysis more than 60 years after its publication. He also produced The Ideas Behind the Chess Openings, which is a useful book for understanding chess openings, though it is badly dated.
After the war, Fine completed his doctorate in psychology and returned to competitive chess. After numerous successes, FIDE named him an International Grandmaster. After Alex Alekhine’s death in 1946, the World Chess Organization also invited him to participate in the upcoming championship to determine the new champion. Fine claimed that he could not interrupt his further studies in psychology, though it has also been speculated that he was suspicious that the three Soviet Union participants in the championship would ensure victory for one of their own. Fine told Larry Evans, a GM in Chess Life, “I don’t want to waste three months of my life watching Russians throw games to each other..”
Despite the fact that, in Fine’s time, the World Chess Organization did not formally record chess ratings, we can retrospectively view his work and determine his score. Chessmetrics.com ranks Fine in the world’s top ten players from March 1936 to October 1942, then again from January 1949 to December 1950. The periods of absence from the top ten players did not mark Fine’s failings, but rather his disappearance from an active chess life in October 1942, and his reappearance in January 1949. Fine ranked as #1 from October 1940 to March 1941, and was placed in the top three from December 1938 to June 1942.
Notes by Fine
Alexandra Kosteniuk's Chess Blog
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In the latter years of WWII, Fine served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Does anyone know where and in what capacity he served? Is this documented in any referenced source?