World Chess Championship Matches (Anthology):Volume I
Edited by Igor Berdichevsky
Hardback:311 pages
Russian Chess House.2002
http://www.chess.com/article/view/world-chess-championship-matches-1
The battle royal has begun.But what about you? You are not going to be an humble patzer here meekly accepting moves of masters. Are you? No, here you are a serious kibitzer matching your wits with the likes of Steinitz and Tschigorin.So what are you supposed to do? Take a good look at the position on move 19.That's Challenge No.1.First, you have to find a simple win for White. That's easy.Then comes the more interesting part.You have to find the combination that Tschigorin chose (only the first few moves are required).
Are you all ready? Here we go!
Many of you must have wondered why Steinitz permitted such a simple win on move 19.The reason has something to do with match psychology. He had already been outplayed.His hope was now to eliminate the knight on d6.He sensed that Tschigorin would rather "play to the gallery" with a combination rather than go for a practical winning move. How well he knew his opponent!Nevertheless, it was a wonderful start to the Match that turned out to be a great struggle.Steinitz won again with the score of 12½-10½.But every one wondered how long the battle-scarred Caesar was going to retain the crown.Two years later the conundrum was resolved...
As for the game here, it continued to make waves.Years after it was played there came the "spoilsport" Dr.Lasker who claimed that Tschigorin's combination would only have drawn.Now you have Challenge No.2.How do you save this combination and prove that it still wins?
This brings us back to the book by Berdichevsky.How good are the annotations here? The present game has notes by Bogoljubow.But even he has a problem dealing with Lasker's move 21...Qe8.Grekov's winning line is not in the book at all. So this book is far from perfect in terms of annotations.I would be able to offer an overall assesssment only at the end of this series.In the next part of the review we shall see another terrific contest.
To be continued