Forgotten Genius - The Life and Games of Grandmaster Dragoljub Velimirovic

Dragoljub Velimirovic was a former Yugoslav – Serbian, chess grandmaster
whose international career was handicapped by political intrigues and his
outspoken temperament. During the heyday of the USSR as the greatest
national chess power, the former Yugoslavia was capable of running the Soviet
Union a good second. Dragoljub Velimirovic posed a real threat to the men from
Moscow. Velimirovic was born in 1942 to a prominent family
from Valjevo, in the former Yugoslavia. He was introduced to chess at the age
of seven by his mother, Jovanka Velimirovic, one of Yugoslavia’s leading female
chess players.

He died at the age 72, being one of the last
players to develop a system or strategy that is so inventive it bears its
creator’s name.

It is a feat that is unlikely to be repeated
in the modern era, when computer-based games and databases so thoroughly
dominate competition that it is almost impossible to come up with something
new.

That does not
mean that players were more talented or courageous in the decades when
Velimirovic was in his prime. Velimirovic, who became a grandmaster in 1973,
was never among the 20 top-ranked players in the world. And that was when there
were only 200 or so grandmasters; today, there are about 2,400.