[citation needed] Chigorin was born in Gatchina but moved to nearby Saint Petersburg some time later.

He became serious about chess uncommonly late in life; his schoolteacher taught him the moves at the age of 16, but he did not take to the game until around 1874, having first finished his studies before commencing a career as a government officer.

He played a series of matches with established masters Emanuel Schiffers (1878–1880) and Semyon Alapin (1880) and notched up a large plus score against each.

His first international tournament was Berlin 1881, where he was equal third (+10−5=1) with Szymon Winawer, behind Johannes Zukertort and Joseph Henry Blackburne.

Chigorin had the slight advantage of choosing the openings in advance from a list supplied by Steinitz and duly won both games.

All of the greatest players of the time participated in the event and Chigorin's outstanding result included winning his individual encounter with tournament victor, Harry Nelson Pillsbury.

The latter was however something of a hollow victory, as it was emerging that the Rice Gambit was unsound and so, playing the black side in each game gave him a distinct advantage.

Frank Marshall once commented on the highly agitated state that would possess Chigorin when faced with difficult positions.

Aside from the usual frantic foot-tapping and crossing of legs, he would occasionally become "a bundle of nerves", at which point his temperament could turn "quite fierce".

According to the Canadian International Master Lawrence Day, Chigorin travelled with the young Fedor Bogatyrchuk to Russian events in the 1905–1907 period, helping to train him.

This prompted a prediction that he had only months to live, whereupon he returned to his estranged wife and daughter in Lublin and died the following January.

Overshadowed to some extent in the 1920s by the exciting new theories of the hypermodern movement, Chigorin's influence nevertheless demands a prominent and permanent place in the Soviet chess hegemony of the 20th century.

It is now generally regarded as a forerunner of King's Indian setups, but Chigorin also played it with other ideas (such as b2–b3) in mind.

[2] A famous Chigorin game played against Steinitz in 1892 is used as the base for the plot of The Squares of the City, a 1965 science-fiction novel by John Brunner.