A blog post dedicated to the annotations, from the contemporary Soviet chess press, of the games of the 1969 World Championship match. In the spring of 1969 the defending champion Tigran Petrosian once again faced challenger Boris Spassky in a 24-game match for the World Championship. As the defeated challenger, this time around Spassky had…
A blog post devoted to the six-game match for the Soviet championship between World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik and grandmaster Mark Taimanov. Botvinnik won the match by the narrowest of margins, to take his sixth and final Soviet title. In Moscow during late January and early February 1953, shortly before an era of Soviet history came…
A brief blog post dedicated to the memory of the grandmaster and celebrated trainer, Yuri Dokhoian, who has died at the age of 56. Yuri Rafaelovich Dokhoian was born on 23rd October 1964 in the village of Zyryanovka in the Altai region of Western Siberia. It is not clear at what age he began to…
A brief blog post to mark the occasion of the 70th birthday of the famous Swedish grandmaster. Ulf Andersson was born in the Swedish town of Arboga on 27th June 1951. He would grow up to become one of the world’s leading grandmasters (at his peak, he reached #4 on the FIDE rating list), developing…
A brief blog post dedicated to the first of Karpov’s wins in the first of the series of matches between two of the greatest World Champions. The first of what would prove to be five matches between Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov opened in the prestigious venue of the Hall of Columns in the House…
A brief blog post devoted to Andrei Sokolov, former World #3. Today, the name of Andrei Sokolov (b. 1963, Vorkuta, USSR) is not a well-known one. Since the year 2000 he has lived in France, and represented that nation in international team competitions. At the time of writing, his FIDE rating is a lowly 2490.…
To mark the occasion of Anatoly Karpov’s 70th birthday on 23rd May 2021, a brief blog post devoted to his annotations to the six victories from his 1981 match v. Korchnoi in Merano, with which he retained the title of World Champion. In the autumn of 1981 in the northern Italian town of Merano, Anatoly…
A short blog post dedicated to Tigran Petrosian’s annotations to two of his games from the ‘Spartak’ Team Championship (Moscow, 1961). The role of ‘voluntary societies’ (essentially, clubs) was a critically important one in the organisation of sport, including chess, in the Soviet Union. Individual and team events at the Republic and All-Union level were…
A blog post dedicated to Aleksandr Kotov’s crushing victory at the 1952 FIDE Interzonal tournament, with a selection of his games from the event with annotations from the Soviet tournament book. The second FIDE Interzonal tournament, like the inaugural event four years earlier, took place in the resort town of Saltsjöbaden, not far from the…
A short blog post featuring a translation of Max Euwe’s notes to his encounter with Mikhail Botvinnik, from the tournament at Nottingham 1936 – as they appeared in ‘Shakhmaty v SSSR’. The great tournament at Nottingham in 1936 featured no fewer than five World Champions, past, present and future – Emanuel Lasker, José Raúl Capablanca,…
A short blog post dedicated to a fascinating draw between Mikhail Botvinnik and Max Euwe, from the Leningrad tournament of 1934. During the 1930s a series of tournaments were organised in the Soviet Union, the aim of which was to test the new generation of Soviet masters against the best professionals of the West. The…
A brief blog post featuring translations of Mikhail Botvinnik’s annotations to the games of the first Alekhine v. Bogoljubow match, as they appear in the book ‘Match Alekhine-Bogoljubov na pervenstvo mira’, published in the USSR in 1931. Alexander Alekhine had become the 4th World Chess Champion in 1927 by defeating Capablanca in one of the…
A blog post devoted to the annotations of some of David Bronstein’s early games, as they appeared in the Soviet press. In 1951, David Ionovich Bronstein famously came very close to winning the World Championship at his first attempt. Ahead in the match v. Mikhail Botvinnik with only two of the twenty-four games remaining, he…
A blog post dedicated to the Russian-language tournament book on the great international tournament held in Bled, Yugoslavia, during September & October of 1961. Even by the standards of the cities of the former Yugoslavia, the Slovenian capital Bled has an outstanding chess tradition. In 1959 the first half of the marathon (28-round!) FIDE Candidates’…
A blog post dedicated to the famous drawn game between the 6th and 11th World Champions at the 1962 FIDE Olympiad, featuring a translation of Botvinnik’s annotations to the game, and details of the background to the encounter. The Soviet and U.S. teams met in the penultimate (10th) round of the finals of the 15th…
