Born into a Polish Jewish family in Antwerp, Belgium,[1] Koltanowski learned chess by watching his father and brother play.

[2] He got his first big break in chess at age 21, when he visited an international tournament in Meran, planning to play in one of the reserve sections.

The organizers were apparently confused or mixed up about his identity and asked him to play in the grandmaster section, to replace an invited player who had not shown up.

Koltanowski gladly accepted and finished near the bottom, but drew with Grandmaster Tarrasch and gained valuable experience.

Koltanowski thereafter toured the United States tirelessly for years, running chess tournaments and giving simultaneous exhibitions everywhere.

After his failure in the 1946 U.S. Open in Pittsburgh, he never played tournament chess again, except for two games as a member of the U.S. team in the 10th Chess Olympiad (Helsinki 1952), getting a draw with Soviet Grandmaster Alexander Kotov, one of the strongest players in the world, and a draw with Hungarian International Master Tibor Florian, in a game which Koltanowski appeared to be winning.

On 4 December 1960, in San Francisco, California, Koltanowski played 56 consecutive games blindfolded, with only ten seconds per move.

[3] Possessed of an incredibly powerful memory, Koltanowski would give blindfold exhibitions, playing several games simultaneously.

In 1940, the United States Consul in Cuba saw Koltanowski giving a chess exhibition in Havana and decided to grant him a U.S. visa.

Following a system similar to that adopted in the Kasparov versus The World match, readers would vote on moves and send them into the Chronicle.

Of the countless patterns for achieving this feat, there are trillions of sequences for performing the more restricted version known as the re-entrant (or closed) tour, wherein the knight on its 64th move lands on its original starting square.

However, it was his original twist that gave Koltanowski's performance dramatic value well beyond the mechanical moving of the knight through the memorized sequence.

As he solved problems on a large demonstration board, audience members were encouraged to come onstage to enter words and numbers into the squares.

Making imaginary knight-moves through his re-entry sequence, Koltanowski would recite the contents of each square as the knight landed on it.

As amazing as this performance was, if time permitted afterward, Koltanowski would occasionally demonstrate his mental grasp of the board by reciting the information contained in the squares by rank or file, or even the two long diagonals.