Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, GM Bagirov for many years, until the emergence of Garry Kasparov, was the best Azeri player. Direct disciple of Makogonov, like the great masters Stein and Gufeld, was formed with the model of Akiba Rubinstein, very academic and solid game and considered by many, something static.
But when in 1980 he moved to Riga, Latvia; influenced very sharp players such as Shirov, Vitolinsh, Lanka and Shabalov; continuing the tradition of the Riga Wizards that may include Nimzovich, Koblentz and, of course, Tal and Gipslis.

With an Armenian father and a Ukrainian mother, Bagirov was born in 1936 in Baku, a city that was very international at the time, with a large number of Armenians, Germans, Russians and Jews from various parts of the USSR. A year after he was born, after the purges of Stalin in 1937, Vladimir Konstantinovich was orphaned as a father and his young mother raised him, and according to GM Sosonko, he had a difficult life.

With the guidance of Makogonov, an expert in the study of openings and with great sense to link the ideas of the openings with the endings to which they lead, Bagirov acquired a good reputation as a specialist in his participation in the USSR championships since 1960.

His main books were about the Alekhine Defense and the English Opening, which highlights the very accurate selection of variants and model games.

English Opening: Symmetrical

Bagirov based his books on his own notes and analysis of his authorship that he collected in notebooks, which in 1980 in Riga did not accustom him so much. They had agendas, of course, but with about four five formats. Bagirov added ten more formats for Latvian agendas. When GM Gipslis gave his courses in Mexico in the mid-1980s, he already had notebooks and notebooks with Bagirov's additions, and he used them profusely in Malta, at the Olympiad, when I could talk extensively about it with him, but by 1987 when I met Gipslis again in Innsbruck, Austria, both being in our role as coaches in the U16 World Championship, when they were serious, that is, only the national champion participated by country, and they were not open as now the U16 World Cups, now the formats were 25. Gipslis respected Bagirov very much. But even in the north of the USSR, Bagirov was still a man from the East, as they referred to a lot. Caucasian classic, voice and strong gestures and very strict.
1998 World Senior Champion, when there was only +60, he traveled part of Europe in the last two years of his life playing Opens.

Bagirov had a large collection of his handwritten notes. It is said that when he had a precarious adolescence and there was a shortage of books in Baku, he copied several books by hand, especially that of the Rabinovich Finals.

His book of study methods, failed to come to light, by the dissolution of the USSR, but published until his death articles in various media. By the end of 1999, they were about to edit their book, but they were already in poor health and would die in the year 2000 of a heart attack, immediately after playing a game in an open tournament.
Already in the era of computers, many notes were scanned and circulated among his students and several experts in Defense Alekhine have taken out some monographs that are not known how much they were influenced by those notes. But his books translated into several languages, such as English and Defense Alekhine, are considered classics and models of how books on openings should be.

He wrote very good articles in New in Chess Yearbooks, which should be studied for their high quality.