Sergey Kaminer. White to play and win White has a material advantage, but it's well-known that two extra Knights without pawns are insufficient for a win. Two Knights and Bishop against two Knights (without pawns) also can't win. Sergey Kamine...
Henri Weenink. White to play and win My choice is determined by the simplicity of the study, interesting move ideas and some elements of surprise. It's clear that White can't win with "simple" moves. If Bishop goes to d3, e4 or f5, White will lo...
Compiled by Gia Nadareishvili, Grandmaster for chess compositions (1921-1991). Presented as puzzles (see move lists for variants and annotations). Alexey Troitsky. White to play and draw. An ingenious idea. White try to Queen their pawn with che...
What were your sporting targets at the 1974 Championship? Essentially, I didn't play any chess in the first half of the year, but after the Olympiad, my schedule was very intense: 96 games in half a year, with short breaks. So I didn't count on a...
From the 64 newspaper, 24th July 1968 My impressions about Grandmaster Mikhail Tal were always clear enough, but only after our match I have finally witnessed his true chess make-up. First and foremost (it may even sound paradoxical for those wit...
Footage from the Seven Steps Beyond Horizon documentary Subtitles: Grandmaster M. Tal, blindfold simultaneous display Announcer: Board six, Nb8 to c6. M. Tal: c3 takes d4. Announcer: Board eight, d6 takes e5. M. Tal: e4 to e5 (? Both Tal...
All ages are given at the day of the tournament's beginning. The oldest player to take part in the USSR Championship: Vasily Smyslov - 67 years, 4 months, 1 day (1988) Vladas Mikenas - 60 years, 7 months, 8 days (1970) Grigory Levenfish - 6...
The whole program was posted on Youtube on Summer. I have discovered it only recently and translated all that was said and made the TV cut. It differs from my other blog posts about that interview in one thing: I translated Tal's words directly,...
In 1919, Alexander Alekhine worked at a film studio in USSR. A man entered the lobby and asked to see someone from the educational department. "I'm listening, Mr. Poluektov", Alekhine said. "Do we know each other?" the visitor asked, puzzled. "...
This game was played at the 1988 USSR Championship. Vasily Smyslov, 68 at the time, shows his 19 years old namesake that he's still a formidable opponent. Annotated by Vasily Smyslov and Garry Kasparov. Another game from the same tournament. Sm...
I provided this classical Ilyin-Zhenevsky article (published in 1926) with some stats and links to the mentioned games. When just a year ago, at the 3rd Soviet Chess Congress, someone requested to organize an international chess tournament in Mos...
Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky is not a name you'd find in chess books. The famous Marshal of the Soviet Union won his "games" on real battlefields of World War II, controlling much more than 16 pieces on the board. Nevertheless, chess was his hob...
Part 1: Yuri Averbakh, Olga Botvinnik, Mark Taimanov http://blog.chess.com/Spektrowski/botvinnik-100th-anniversary-part-1 Part 2: Viktor Korchnoi, Evgeny Vasiukov http://blog.chess.com/view/botvinnik-100th-anniversary-party-at-suzdal-part-2 N. P...
Part 1, with speeches from Yuri Averbakh, Olga Botvinnik and Mark Taimanov, can be found here: http://blog.chess.com/Spektrowski/botvinnik-100th-anniversary-part-1 N. Polyanskikh: Our people have conquered Alps, time to time. First Suvorov used R...
Transcript of an almost 1.5-hour long video which can be found here: http://chessm.ru/vecher-posvyaschennyj-100-letiyu-mmbotvinnika/ GM Sergey Makarychev (from the screen): More than half a century ago, in Moscow, in the Pillar Hall of the House ...
Interview by Yuri Vasilyev, Sport-Express. 17 August 2011 http://others.sport-express.ru/reviews/15791/ A senior tournament is currently held in Suzdal in memory of Mikhail Botvinnik. The arbiter of this tournament is the 89 years old grandmaste...
There are jokes in Tbilisi that during his illness, Tigran Petrosian took some beneficial drug, called "antidefeatine", and he crushes all his opponents with ease after that. He won 5 games out of 8 and drew such strong players as D. Bronstein, P....
Next installment in the series of Salomon Flohr's articles is dedicated to the 1959 USSR Championship won by Tigran Petrosian. The original report didn't include games, but I will post all the games he mentioned. In the Age-Old Tbilisi The Sovie...
This article about Mikhail Tal was written by the famous Czech-Soviet Grandmaster and chess writer Salomon Flohr after Tal won his first USSR Championship in 1957. He was quite accurate in his prediction that Tal would eventually challenge Botvinn...
Annotations by Leonid Shamkovich, from his book Sacrifice in Chess.
64, issue 45, 1970. Tal's third (and final) report from Sochi. Either the masters have finally managed to acclimatize or their physical form was better than their venerable opponents', but the struggle in the last seven rounds was completely even...
64, issue 44, 1970. Second part of Tal's report. An original match between grandmasters and masters is almost equal, and there's some concrete proof for that. As the readers already know, the teams get White pieces by turns. And that's what is in...
Mikhail Tal's first report in 64 about the "grandmasters versus masters" tournament in Sochi 1970. Recently, I received a valuable gift from chess fans of Ryazan: a file of the 64 newspaper published in 1935-37. Reading through the "grandmother" ...
For something more positive - a game more than half a century old, by 17 years-old Tal. He annotated it for the Riga chess bulletin.
