It was one of the most famous matches in the history of chess. Fischer’s 6:0 clean sweep against Soviet grandmaster Mark Taimanov in the quarter-final of the Candidates had been quite unprecedented. To repeat the feat against Bent Larsen seemed utterly inconcievable. The games of the match were later annotated by leading Soviet grandmasters for…
Vladimir Pavlovich Simagin (1919-1968) was one of the most original chess thinkers of the twentieth century. His collection of ‘Best Games’ (Luchshie Partii), published by Fizkultura i Sport in 1963 under the editorship of M. Beilin, is a fascinating book, which contains a great number of striking games. An early portrait of ‘Master Simagin’. Perhaps…
A brief post dedicated to Iivo Nei’s startling victory over the famously hard-to-defeat Tigran Petrosian from the USSR Team Championship of 1960, with some brief biographical information on the winner. The 7th USSR Team Championship was held in Moscow from 1st-15th October 1960. The final was an eight-round all-play all event featuring teams from Moscow…
A short blog post featuring an interesting encounter from the 29th USSR Championship, between two World Champions, with annotations by a third. 1961 was, unusually, a year with two Soviet championships. The 28th, which was held in Moscow during January and February, was won by Tigran Petrosian, taking his second title in the space of…
A blog post dedicated to the famous game between Nezhmetdinov and Tal from the 29th USSR Championship, with some background to the encounter and brief biographical details of Nezhmetdinov. This celebrated encounter has appeared in many publications over the years. It was annotated shortly after the championship in Baku by Nezhmetdinov himself, for the magazine…
A short blog post featuring translations of Karpov’s annotations to two of his victories at the 1980 IBM tournament in Amsterdam, and some brief background to the event. In early 1980 it was announced that IBM was to end its sponsorship of a series of tournaments that had been held during the summer of each…
A blog post featuring Tal and Koblencs’ commentary to the ex-World Champion’s game v. Anatoly Karpov from the 44th USSR Championship (Moscow, 1976), and some background to the event. The 44th USSR Championship final took place in Moscow in the Central House of Culture of Railway Workers on Komsomolskaya Ploshchad – a well-known venue that…
A short blog post featuring translations of Anatoly Karpov’s contemporary annotations to two of his victories from the Montréal tournament of 1979. Anatoly Karpov, pictured at the Tilburg tournament, 3rd November 1979. (Photo credit: K. Sujk, ANEFO, via the Dutch National Archive.) I have already written about the ‘Tournament of Stars’ in Montréal here. The…
By early 1972 it was already becoming clear that Anatoly Karpov was a potential future World Champion. Still only 20 years old, he was rated 2630, which put him at 7th-8th on the FIDE rating list, just ahead of such famous names as Larsen, Tal, Smyslov and Stein. In December of 1971 he had sensationally…
A blog post devoted to the event that was later recognised as the 1st USSR Championship, which took place in Moscow in October 1920. Early in 1920, with the Russian Civil War still raging, the well-known chessplayer and Old Bolshevik A. F. Ilyin-Zhenevsky was appointed to the post of head Commissar at the Headquarters of…
A blog post featuring translations of the annotations by Igor Bondarevsky (Spassky’s second) to all eight games of the Spassky-Geller Candidates’ Quarter-final, and some background information on the match. Geller and Spassky were meeting in the Candidates’ matches for the second time. In the previous cycle they had met at the Semi-final stage, in Riga…
A blog post featuring translations of annotations (by Smyslov, Bronstein, Keres, Kotov, Averbakh, Flohr, Simagin & Szabó) to the games of the 1949 Budapest-Moscow match-tournament, with some background information on the event. Almost 70 years ago, during March and April of 1949, a match-tournament between teams representing the Soviet and Hungarian capitals took place. The…
