Miguel Najdorf

Miguel Najdorf (born as Mieczysław Najdorf; 1910 – 1997) was a Polish-Argentine chess player.

He was born in 1910 in Warsaw, Poland. In 1930, at the age of 20, he was already an International Master. In 1939 the break-up of World War II caught him in Buenos Aires, where he was playing the 8th Chess Olympiad, representing Poland. He decided to stay in Argentina.

He was one of the world's leading chess players in the 1950s and 1960s; he excelled in playing blindfold chess. In 1950 he became an International Grandmaster, in the same year he played the Candidates Tournament and finished 5th. Three years later, in the Zurich Candidates Tournament in 1953, he got the 6th position. He won important tournaments as the ones in Mar del Plata (1961) and Havana (1962 and 1964), he also took part in several Chess Olympiads representing Argentina, their best result being the second place obtained in Helsinki (1952). He died in 1997 in Málaga, Spain.

A variation of the Sicilian Defence is named after him.