A short blog post dedicated to the final tournament in the long career of the 6th World Champion.
To mark the 75th anniversary of the Leidsch Schaakgenootschap (the Leiden Chess Club), attempts were made to organise a match between Mikhail Botvinnik (USSR) and Bobby Fischer (USA) that would take place in the spring of 1970. Preparations for the match had begun a year in advance. As Frank Brady writes in his book Profile of a Prodigy
…Negotiations for a Botvinnik-Fischer match were initiated, and to everyone’s surprise both players accepted. Bobby’s reaction to it was favourable, and Botvinnik was reported as saying he was “intrigued”. Dr Max Euwe was appointed as match director, and the stakes were healthy for a non-title match: $8,000 for the winner and $5,000 for the loser.
(For context, the winner’s prize is equivalent to c. $50,000 in today’s money.) Initially, a match of ten or twelve games was proposed, but then Fischer began lengthy negotiations to increase the number of games to eighteen. No sooner had agreement on this point been reached than changed his demands; he wanted an unlimited match, with the first to six wins (draws not counting) being the winner. Not surprisingly, a match of unknown duration was unacceptable to the organisers in Leiden, and with Fischer unwilling to bend on this point, negotiations for the match broke down.
Instead, a quadrangular tournament was organised, featuring Botvinnik and his compatriot, World Champion Boris Spassky, Danish grandmaster Bent Larsen and Dutch grandmaster Hein Donner. This was a strong line-up; three of the four players had taken part in the recently-completed ‘Match of the Century‘ in Belgrade.
The event took place from 16th April (the opening ceremony) until 5th May (the final round) 1970, with each player facing the others four times. The venue was the Rijnlands Lyceum in the small town of Oegstgeest, a short distance from Leiden. The players were accomodated in the nearby coastal town of Noordwijk.
The opening ceremony on 16th April 1970 – L to R: Larsen, Donner, Botvinnik & Spassky.
The event was duly won by the World Champion, Spassky, who went through the event undefeated (+2, -0, =10). However, there were very few decisive games (six in total, only 25% of the games played). A 50% score was thus sufficient to give Donner 2nd place, with Botvinnik and Larsen sharing 3rd-4th on ‘-1’.
The opening round in progress, on the 17th April 1970.
Botvinnik later complained that the venue was damp, without ventilation, and he stated that his games in the event gave him “little creative satisfaction”. Nonetheless, three of them later made their way into his games collection, Analytical & Critical Works. While the first encounter with Spassky is fairly nondescript, the second featured an instructive defence in a difficult endgame, while his game v. Larsen featured a very fine ending in what proved to be the final victory of his long and highly distinguished career.
Translations of Botvinnik’s annotations can be downloaded at the links below:
Botvinnik-Spassky, Leiden 1970
Spassky-Botvinnik, Leiden 1970
Botvinnik in play v. Donner in the opening round.
SOURCES:
The quote by Frank Brady is from his biography of Fischer, Profile of a Prodigy (Dover, 1973, Chapter XXI).
Botvinnik discusses the event briefly in his autobiographty K dostizheniyu tseli, Fizkultura i Sport, Moscow 1978. The game annotations are translated from Botvinnik’s Analyticheskie i kriticheskie raboty 1957-1970 (Fizkultura i Sport, Moscow 1986.)
The photos are from the Dutch National Archive; unfortunately the name of the photographer is not indicated in this source and therefore it is not possible to credit them here.
Soviet Chess History 