Zdravko Maslar (26-10-1932 - 24-04-2022) Serbian chess composer, solver and International Master of the FIDE

Zdravko Maslar has composed in all genres, with or without his brother Slavko. He is specialized in helpmates, especially with strategic contents, and was a strong solver of chess problems.

He was the organizer of the yearly Andernach meeting, which mostly deals with fairy problems and which we wish we could visit every year.

His stlye

The trademark of his composing are some incredible task records.                                                                                       By his character, Zdravko is not strictly a record-hunter, but such achievements came as a result of deep, almost scientific, investigations.

Die Schwalbe magazine wrote

Zdravko Maslar is no more. On 24 April, the legendary Hilfsmatt composer and host of the Andernach Fairytale Chess Meetings passed away after a short illness on Orthodox Easter Sunday in Belgrade. The name of the town of Pilatovići, where he was born on 26 October 1932 and to which he always had close ties, was also the source of his nickname Pile.

Pile found his way into the chess problem in 1951 and soon emerged as a solver in the then still young magazine problem. Its editor, Nenad Petrović, gave him his first specialised knowledge of chess composition and engaged him as an assistant at the 1st FIDE Congress for Chess Composition in Piran, where he met many well-known problem solvers from all over the world in 1958.

As his family suffered greatly in communist Yugoslavia, he fled to the West in 1966, where he established a livelihood by opening his restaurant "Balkan Pik" in the small town of Andernach in 1970. His acquaintance with Peter Kniest, whom he met at the 1974 PCCC meeting in Wiesbaden (as did bernd ellinghoven), was of chess-historical significance, as the two quickly agreed to organise events in his restaurant from 1975 onwards, which, within a few years, developed into the world's largest private problem chess meeting, attended by up to 80 participants from around 20 countries from all over the world, and which has so far had 45 editions before being stopped for the time being by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Now, for the first time, the 46th edition of the meeting at the end of May will have to take place without its founder.

Despite fine initial successes in the orthodox field, Pile converted to the heterodox chess problem early on as a composer and developed a particular penchant for classical auxiliary mate multiple moves. He set high quality standards and was extremely strict with himself and others when it came to assessing the construction of a problem. His question about the "determinatio" of each individual piece was famous, and he was not satisfied until he found a position that met his requirements. He was just as critical in the publication of his book Atelier 64 - Ausgewählte Schachaufgaben, kommentiert von meinen Freunden, published in bernd ellinghoven's black series, which went through a final phase of around ten years because the printer either didn't have time or the author kept finding small improvements necessary until it was finally published in 2016.

Source: dieschwalbe.de