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Ashta’s chess tales

The champion who trusted his eyes

Punjab and London, 1929 to 1933 · 3 minute read

He could not read the chess books. He beat the people who wrote them.

Mir Sultan Khan was born in 1903 in a village in Punjab. He learned chess from his father, in the Indian form of the game, and by his twenties he was the strongest player anyone around him had met.

In 1929 a nobleman in whose household he worked took him to England. Sultan Khan had only recently learned the European rules. He could not read the chess books in which English players studied their openings. He simply sat down and looked at the board.

That summer he won the British Championship. He won it again in 1932 and in 1933.

In the winter of 1930 he sat across from José Raúl Capablanca of Cuba, a former world champion who had once gone eight years without losing a single game. Sultan Khan beat him.

He played for the British team three times at the Chess Olympiad. Then, in 1933, he went home, and the chess world hardly heard of him again. He lived quietly on his farm until 1966.

In 2024, nearly a century after his first title, the world chess federation named him an honorary grandmaster.

What made him so strong? Players who met him said he trusted nothing he had not checked on the board himself. That is a good habit in chess, and a good habit anywhere.