Alexey Troitsky

A. A. Troitsky

Alexey Alexeyevich Troitsky (Russian: Алексе́й Алексе́евич Тро́ицкий; March 14, 1866 – August 1942; also Alexei, Troitzky, Troitzki) was a Russian chess theoretician. He is widely considered to have been one of the greatest composers of chess endgame studies.[1] He is widely regarded as the founder of the modern art of composing chess studies (Seirawan 2003:91). Troitsky died of starvation during World War II at the siege of Leningrad. During the war, many of his notes got destroyed or lost so some of the latest chess problems he composed were never published.

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).

  1. ^ In the introduction to Collection of Chess Studies, Sam Sloan writes "... Trotzky is considered to have been the greatest composer of chess endgame studies ever."