György Bakcsi

Grandmaster György Bakcsi (06.04.1933-11.10.2019), one of the last greats of the former world-class Hungarian chess composers, has passed away. Bakcsi was a very versatile composer, initially mainly on his own, but since the 1990s he wrote many joint compositions with László Zoltán.

Remembering György Bakcsi and his helpmates by Satanick Mukhuty - 25/10/2019 The great Hungarian composer and Grandmaster György Bakcsi passed away on the 11th of this month at the age of 86. Bakcsi was a true creative giant who felt equally at home in many different genres of problem chess. Indeed, he also held the title of International judge for fields as varied as directmates, selfmates, helpmates, and even fairy problems! His multifaceted proficiency together with his disposition for sharp and paradoxical ideas made him one of the most loved composers of twentieth century. In this article we pay the deceased master our heartfelt tribute and discuss a few of his ever entertaining creations which will continue to be cherished for years to come.   György Bakcsi was born on the 6th of April 1933 in Budapest, Hungary. By profession he was a literary historian and wrote several award winning monographs on the works of Russian authors such as Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov. He learnt the game of chess at an early age from his father and initially competed in various tournaments before realizing chess composition to be his true area of passion.    The Hungarian Wikipedia contains a wealth of biographical information on Bakcsi's early life. He lost his father Imre Bartók when he was just ten years old and in 1945 his mother married a typewriter by the name of Béla Bakcsi, thus György took his step-father's name. He graduated from the Kölcsey Ferenc High School in 1951, and then did a year of preparatory studies in the Soviet Union at the Herzen College of Education in Leningrad which led him to join the Gondolat Book Publishing as editor-in-chief. Bakcsi edited the chess composition column of Sakkélet from 1976 until 1985 and also wrote many books about chess problems, among which "Gondolat es Strategie" (1970) and "En passant felugyelo visszater" (1985) are notable.   During the 1930s and 1940s Hungary was the hotbed of helpmate composing. No wonder Bakcsi took to this genre quite naturally and together with stalwarts such as Dr. György Paros, Aurél M Kárpáti and others, became one of its foremost specialists. Today in this article we are going to explore primarily some of these extraordinary helpmate compositions. We had introduced the genre of helpmates or cooperative mates in a previous article of ours. To just recall the definition, a helpmate is a problem where black moves first and both sides work together in unison to checkmate Black in the stipulated number of moves. "                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Source; Chessbase