Alexei Troitsky

Alexei Alexeyevich Troitsky (Russian Алексей Алексе́евич Тро́ицкий, wiss. Transliteration Aleksej Alekséevič Tróickij; * 14 March 1866 in Saint Petersburg; † 14 August 1942 in Leningrad) was a famous Russian chess composer, theorist and author.

He is widely considered to have been one of the greatest composers of chess endgame studies.

Life
Troitsky is considered the founder of modern chess studies.

His first chess problem was printed in 1893, followed by his first study in 1895. In total, he published 750 endgame studies and 50 problems (joke problems and retroanalyses). There were three creative periods in his life.

At the beginning of his compositional activity (1895–1901), he dealt with current study ideas (piece capture, domination, enclosing pieces, positional draw, checkmate and stalemate combinations, problem topics) that outlined the entire further development of chess studies. His early works were characterized by originality and depth of thought.

During his study period (1905–1917), he developed the foundations for the theory of study composition, which are still valid today. He deepened topics that he had already tackled earlier (systematic movement, sub-transformation, battle of different groupings of pieces, synthesis of different ideas, etc.).

In the third period of his work (1924–1942) he perfected the themes he had already worked on earlier. Troitsky's main merit is that he understood chess study as part of a chess game (not just the endgame). He gave it liveliness in the play of figures and naturalness in form. Troitsky's studies set standards in the game, with numerous variations, silent moves, hidden threats. All these elements were organically connected and subordinated to a single goal. In 1928 he was the first chess composer in the USSR to be awarded the title of Honored Artist, and in 1934 he became Master of Sports of the USSR for chess composition.

Theorist
Troitsky investigated the endgame of two knights against a pawn at a young age. The first results were published in 1906 in the German Chess Newspaper and summarized in his book published in 1934. The so-called Troitsky line was named after him, which essentially indicates a limit for the pawn's row up to which this endgame can generally be won.

One of his most famous works involves analyzing the endgame with two knights versus a pawn, see Troitsky line. John Nunn analyzed this endgame with an endgame tablebase and stated that "the analysis of Troitsky ... is astonishingly accurate" (Nunn 1995:265).

Privately
Troitsky worked in forestry. As he himself wrote, all of his chess materials were lost twice. The first time in 1908 in a fire and the second time in the revolutionary year of 1917  For his book published in 1924, he reconstructed numerous endgame studies from memory. This explains the relatively high number of deviations in position (associated with defects) and publication dates of his early studies.

Alexei Troitsky died during the Leningrad blockade.

Literature
A. E. Karpov (English editor): Chess, encyclopedic word. Soviet encyclopedia, Moscow 1990, ISBN 5-85270-005-3. A. Troitsky: 500 Endgame Studies. Chess Publisher Bernhard Kagan, Berlin s. a. 1924, ISBN 1-114-59188-2.
A. A. Troitsky: Constructor of chess games. OGIZ physics and tourism, Leningrad 1934.

Source: de.wikipedia.org