This article is a part of Overlooked, a sequence of obituaries about exceptional folks whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

In July 1929, 12 chess gamers gathered at Chatham House School, a venerable establishment in Ramsgate, England, to contest the British championship. The discipline included a number of well-known masters, in addition to one participant who stood out from the remaining as a result of he was not from England, however from the jewel of the British Empire: India.

His identify was Sultan Khan.

It is uncertain that the opposite rivals knew a lot about him, and so they most likely didn’t regard him as a lot of a risk. At the time, Europe was the middle of the chess world, and although Khan had received the All-India Championship the 12 months earlier than, it was almost certainly towards an inferior stage of competitors in contrast with what he would face within the upcoming match.

In addition, there have been variations within the guidelines of chess performed on the subcontinent. For instance, pawns couldn’t transfer two squares on their first flip, and there was no related rule for castling. Instead, on one transfer through the sport, the king may transfer like a knight. The want to regulate to how the sport was performed in Europe gave Khan ‌a big handicap‌, notably within the early part of video games‌.

Growing up in India beneath British rule, Khan additionally had little or no entry to chess books, so he knew subsequent to nothing in regards to the concept of the right way to start video games — data that his rivals possessed.

None of that stopped him. Khan received the championship convincingly, recording victories in additional than half his video games whereas dropping solely as soon as. This marked the start of a whirlwind interval of 4 years through which Khan competed towards the world’s finest gamers and greater than held his personal.

Despite his first identify, Khan was not royalty. According to a 2020 article by Ather Sultan, his oldest son, and Atiyab Sultan, considered one of his granddaughters, written for the Pakistani news website Dawn, Khan was born in 1903 (another sources say 1905) in Khushab, a city within the Punjab area of modern-day Pakistan. His household have been landowners and pirs, or Sufi non secular guides.

Khan discovered to play chess from his father, Mian Nizam Din, when he was younger, and he was the perfect participant in Punjab by the point he was 21. A rich landowner, Sir Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana, employed him to develop a chess workforce, for which he obtained a month-to-month stipend and room and board. When Sir Umar went to stay in London in 1929 so he may attend the Round Table Conferences for parliamentary reform in India, Khan went with him.

Sitting at a chess desk, Khan minimize a hanging determine along with his lean face, vast brow and sharp eyes. He usually wore a white turban. He was unperturbable, nearly disconcertingly so. Regardless of the place on the board, his demeanor remained placid. He didn’t assume that he had any particular talent at chess however felt that “the player applying the greater concentration should win,” David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld wrote of their e book “The Oxford Companion to Chess” (1984).

After his triumph on the British championship, Khan briefly returned to India, however he was again in England by May 1930 and started receiving invites to compete in elite tournaments. He quickly proved to be among the many finest gamers on the planet.

He tied for fourth in a match in Scarborough, England, in June and July 1930 that included, along with the highest English gamers, 5 of the strongest gamers from the European continent.

He then represented England as its prime participant within the third Chess Olympiad in Hamburg, Germany, a gathering of the highest groups from the highest chess international locations on the planet. Khan scored 9 wins towards 4 losses and 4 attracts.

After Hamburg, Khan competed in Liège, Belgium, in an invitation-only match with a few of Europe’s prime gamers. This time, he took second, behind Savielly Tartakower of Poland. A number of months later, Khan beat Tartakower in a 12-game match.

At an annual elite match in Hastings in late 1930 and early 1931, Khan completed third behind Max Euwe, who would grow to be world champion in 1935, and José Raúl Capablanca, a former world champion who was nonetheless thought-about by many to be the world’s finest participant. During the competitors, Khan induced a sensation by beating Capablanca, slowly outplaying him in a mode paying homage to Capablanca himself.

At the 1931 Chess Olympiad in Prague, Khan once more led the English workforce and once more had an excellent outcome, with eight wins, seven attracts and two losses. His victories included wins towards Akiba Rubinstein and Salomon Flohr, two of the highest 10 gamers on the planet, and amongst his attracts have been video games towards Alexander Alekhine, the reigning world champion, and Efim Bogolyubov, who had twice performed Alekhine for the title.

Khan did not defend the British title in 1931, ending in a tie for second, and ended the 12 months by putting fourth on the 1931-32 Hastings match.

In 1932, he tied for third in a match in London that included Alekhine, Flohr and Tartakower. After narrowly dropping a match to Flohr, Khan performed within the Cambridge Premier League and beat most of Britain’s finest gamers, together with Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander, the Irish cryptologist who would go on to work with Alan Turing throughout World War II to crack the German Enigma machine.

Khan wrapped up the 12 months by putting fourth in a match in Bern, Switzerland, that included Alekhine, Euwe, Flohr and Bogoljubov; successful the British Championship for the second time; and tying for third on the 1932-33 Hastings match.

Khan’s final aggressive 12 months, 1933, was a lot slower. The solely main occasions he participated in have been the Olympiad in Folkestone, England, once more as England’s prime participant, and the British championship, at which he received the title for the third time.

In December 1933, Sir Umar determined to return to India, and Khan returned with him, because it was too costly to remain. Khan was evidently glad to go away England. He disliked the chilly, wet climate and had suffered bouts of malaria and continuous colds and sore throats. Ghulam Fatima, a chess participant who labored for Sir Umar in his family in London and who received the British girls’s championship in 1933, instructed Hooper and Whyld for his or her e book that Khan, on leaving England, “felt that he had been freed from prison.”

Back in India, Khan performed one match in 1935, towards V.Ok. Khadilkar, beating him soundly by successful 9 video games and drawing one.

And that was it. He stopped taking part in, at the very least in competitions.

In a short documentary that aired on British tv within the late Seventies, Ather Sultan stated that he had as soon as requested his father why he had not tried to play for the world championship, and that his father stated that, on the time, the challenger wanted to place up a stake of two,000 kilos (about $230,000 in immediately’s {dollars}), which he didn’t have.

According to the Dawn article, Khan then married and had 5 sons and 6 daughters. He spent the remainder of his life cultivating his farmland earlier than dying in Sargodha on April 25, 1966.

While his youngsters and grandchildren discovered to play chess, they largely adopted different careers. Ather Sultan stated that his father had “told them they should do something more useful with their lives.”

There have been no official rankings when Khan performed, however in accordance with Chess Metrics, a extensively revered web site that has compiled retroactive rankings going again greater than 200 years, he was No. 6 or No. 7 on the planet during the last two years of his chess-playing profession. Hooper and Whyld surmised that Khan overcame his lack of awareness about openings as a result of he was among the many finest gamers on the planet within the middle-game part and ‌among the many prime two or three gamers within the endgame part, together with Capablanca.

“Black & White: The Official Biography of Chess Champion Sultan Khan,” by Atiyab Sultan and Ather Sultan, can be revealed in June.

In the Dawn article, his son and granddaughter famous ruefully that most of the gamers Khan defeated have been anointed grandmasters and worldwide masters by the International Chess Federation when the federation started giving out these titles in 1950, although most of them had handed their primes. But Khan was by no means equally acknowledged.

Perhaps the perfect sobriquet he may have obtained, nevertheless, got here from a revered modern. Capablanca, who is usually thought-about one of many biggest pure abilities of all time, described Khan in his writings with a phrase that he nearly by no means used: “genius.”