Rudolf Charousek (19 September 1873 – 18 April 1900) was a Czech born Hungarian chess player. One of the top ten players in the world during the 1890s, he had a short career, dying at the age of 26 from tuberculosis. Reuben Fine wrote of him "Playing over his early games is like reading Keats's poetry: you cannot help feeling a grievous, oppressive sense of loss, of promise unfulfilled". Charousek was born in Klein Lometz (modern Lomeček) near Prague, Bohemia. At the age of five weeks, his family moved to Debrecen, Hungary, where he became a naturalized Hungarian. They later moved to Miskolc where, at the age of 16, he learned to play chess. Studying law in Kassa, he is said to have copied out the voluminous Handbuch des Schachspiels by hand, unable to afford his own copy. Despite the lack of competition in Kassa, he soon became a strong player, and also qualified as a lawyer. In 1893 he entered a correspondence tournament organised by the Budapest newspaper Pesti Hirlap, in which he eventually shared first place with another up and coming Hungarian master, Géza Maróczy. He joined the Budapest chess club, where he frequently played with Maróczy and Gyula Makovetz, and convincingly defeated Gyozo Exner in a match.

Notable games

This is Charousek's last round win over the World Champion in his international tournament debut: Charousek-Lasker, Nuremberg 1896 Another of Charousek's games, which Grandmaster Andrew Soltis described as "one of the prettiest ever", was the basis for the sty Last Round by Kester Svendsen, which Soltis called "perhaps the finest chess short story". Here is the game with punctuation marks by Soltis: Charousek—Wollner, Kaschau 1893 A variation of the Queen's Gambit Declined is named after him.