Isaac Yefremovich Boleslavsky (Ukrainian: Ісаак Єфремович Болеславський, Russian: Исаак Ефремович Болеславский; 9 June 1919 – 15 February 1977) was a Soviet chess grandmaster and writer.
He won eight of his last ten games and tied for fifth-sixth place with Mikhail Botvinnik, but lost their personal meeting.
[2] Boleslavsky secured a clear advantage in the opening thanks to his superior pawn structure and won without allowing Fine much counterplay.
The Soviets regarded Fine as possibly the strongest American player, based on his international results in the pre-World War II era.
In the 1951 World Championship cycle, Boleslavsky qualified from the first-ever Interzonal at Saltsjöbaden 1948 into the Candidates Tournament two years later in Budapest.
In the Candidates tournament—the winner of which would play a World Chess Championship match against Mikhail Botvinnik—he was the only undefeated player, and led for most of the tournament, but in the last round he was caught by Bronstein, who later won a playoff in Moscow that same year (+3−2=9).
In 1953, he participated in the Candidates' tournament in Zürich, but finished in 10th–11th places, and never qualified for subsequent world championship cycles.
He died in Minsk on February 15, 1977, at the age of 57, after falling on an icy sidewalk, fracturing his hip and contracting a fatal infection while in hospital.
He had a virtuoso feeling for the dynamics of the opening, and always aimed for a complicated and double-edged struggle, although by nature he was one of the most modest grandmasters with whom I have had the pleasure of rubbing shoulders.
[5] One of his friends and disciples, Grandmaster Alexey Suetin, wrote in the magazine Chess in the USSR: Boleslavsky was a man of exceptional modesty and great culture.
He perfectly knew history, classical literature, poetry ... a truly innovative man, proven by his remarkable debut of systems in the Sicilian and King's Indian, his research enriched a number of other current openings.
the "English attack" in the classical sense), but it can be contrasted against related but different Sicilians where Black chooses to play e6 instead of the e5 move; this avoids creating a 'hole' on d5 and the position instead transposes into a Scheveningen type of setup.
It is also worth mentioning that the backward pawn on d6 is not so easily targeted by the white pieces due to the fact that it is usually well protected by Black's dark squared bishop occupying the e7-square.
In the famous Bg5 Najdorf Sicilian,[6] the pawn advance e5 is rarely ever played at the top level because the white knight can hop into the f5-square with good practical chances for securing an advantage.