A short blog post dedicated to Nezhmetdinov’s celebrated victory against Polugaevsky from the 1958 RSFSR Championship, featuring a translation of annotations by the winner as well as some brief background to the event in Sochi. The championship of the RSFSR (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) was one of the more important events in the…
A blog post dedicated to the Tal v. Larsen Candidates’ Semi-final of 1965, featuring translations of Tal’s annotations to nine of the games of the match, plus some background to the event. The Danish grandmaster Bent Larsen was appearing in the Candidates’ Semi-final by virtue of his Quarter-final victory over Borislav Ivkov of Yugoslavia by…
A blog post dedicated to the final decisive game between the 2nd and 3rd World Champions, featuring a translation of Capablanca’s annotations from the Soviet tournament book, and some reminiscences on the background to the game by Yakov Rokhlin. The 3rd Moscow International tournament took place in the summer of 1936. The first two events…
A short blog post dedicated to two remarkable defensive achievements of the 6th World Chess Champion, played within a couple of years of each other in 1950s. Translations of his annotations to the games are available to download. Mikhail Botvinnik was one of the game’s greatest analysts. His ability to get to the essence of…
A blog post dedicated to the appearance of two of the leading Soviet grandmasters in the international tournament at Venice, 1950, featuring translations of Smyslov’s and Kotov’s annotations to some of their games from the event, as well as extracts from Kotov’s report on the tournament from the Soviet Chess Yearbook. The 2nd round at…
A blog post dedicated to the later games of the outstanding Soviet grandmaster, Lev Abramovich Polugaevsky (1934-1995), with his contemporary annotations from the Soviet chess press. The early and middle years of Polugaevsky’s career are well covered by two magnificent books, published in English in the 1980s by Pergamon Press. The first, which was a…
A blog post featuring a translation of Mikhail Gurevich’s annotations to his spectacular victory over Julian Hodgson from the 1989 European Team Championship, with some personal recollections from the event. The European Team Championship held in Haifa in 1989 was the first such event for six years, and the first to be held on the…
Mikhail Tal took part in the 1986 edition of the ‘Berliner Sommer’, an event which was one of the largest ‘opens’ in Europe. Despite his relative unfamiliarity with Swiss systems, and despite the difficult playing conditions, he succeeded in taking 1st place (on tie-break). He later wrote a report on the event for the Soviet…
A blog post dedicated to the Tal v. Portisch Candidates’ Quarter-final of 1965, featuring translations of Tal’s annotations to all eight games of the match, plus some background to the event. In 1965, for the first time the FIDE Candidates’ competition took the form of a series of knock-out matches rather than an all-play-all match-tournament…
A short blog post dedicated to Vassily Ivanchuk’s win v. the World Champion Garry Kasparov, from the Linares super-tournament of 1991. It features a translation of the contemporary annotations by the winner, from the Soviet magazine ’64’. The 21-year-old Vassily Ivanchuk, pictured after winning the 1991 edition of the Ciudad de Linares tournament. (Credit: unknown.)…
A blog post dedicated to two remarkable games by Vyacheslav Ragozin, in which the outstanding Soviet theoretician developed the opening system that was to bear his name – the Ragozin Variation of the Queen’s Gambit Declined. Some brief biographical details of Ragozin are also presented. Vyacheslav Ragozin, pictured in play v. Salo Flohr in the…
A blog post dedicated to Mikhail Botvinnik’s annotations to three of his games from the 7th USSR Championship, with some background to that event. None of the games appear in any of Botvinnik’s later collections of games, but they are nonetheless full of interest. The final of the 7th USSR Championship took place in Moscow…
