A blog post dedicated to Mikhail Botvinnik’s book on the first of his three World Championship matches against Vasily Smyslov. Vasily Smyslov qualified for the 1954 match against Mikhail Botvinnik by convincingly winning the great Candidates’ Tournament held at Zürich and Neuheusen in the autumn of 1953. He went through that marathon event losing only…
A blog post containing translations of Anatoly Karpov’s annotations to some of his finest games during period 1969-1984. A number of collections of Anatoly Karpov’s games were published in the Soviet press in one form or another. On this blog, a number of pages have appeared featuring Karpov’s annotations to some of his finest games…
A blog post devoted to Anatoly Karpov’s historic match-win against Boris Spassky in the 1974 Candidates semi-final. I was present as a reporter during the match in Leningrad, and I witnessed how impressively Karpov defeated the ex-World Champion. His wins in this match were awe-inspiring. Jan Timman, ‘Timman’s Titans’ (New in Chess, 2016) The semi-finals…
A short biography of the outstanding Czechoslovak, and later Soviet, grandmaster, Salo Flohr. In the 1930s they all trembled before Flohr. The 6th World Champion, M. M. Botvinnik, quoted in Genna Sosonko’s ‘The Reliable Past’ (New in Chess, 2003, p. 166.) In the decade before the Second World War, Salo Flohr took part in 35…
A blog post dedicated to the 75th anniversary of one of the great tournaments in the history of chess, the 1946 Groningen international – the first foreign event at which the USSR was represented by several players. The first major post-war chess tournament in Europe took place exactly three quarters of a century ago in…
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,…
