Paul Keres

Any fans of this brilliant Estonian-Soviet player around?

His long and illustrous career spans almost 40 years, with international tournaments won between 1937 and 1975 (this includes AVRO-supertournament in 1938, ahead of Capablanca, Alekhine, Euwe and Botvinnik), nine World Champions defeated (everyone from Capablanca to Fischer) and the somewhat tragical four second places in the Candidates' Tournaments, always nearly missing a chance to play a World Championship match.

An illustrative game, with comments by Yakov Neyshtadt.

A great game and a player who deserves much more attention..

Alekhine did actually offer Keres to play a match in 1943, but Keres declined.

I have his book titled "Power Chess: Great Grandmaster Battles From Russia". It's an interesting book and he provides entertaining and insightful commentary so I'll call myself a fan of his.

Thanks for pointing this out, the book is quite interesting.

Keres authored other books, including one together with his opponent in the posted game, Kotov. It was called "The Art of Middlegame" or something similar.

Possibly my favorite player of all time.. I'm going to play like that one day :) (God Willing Of Course)

Here's an excellent lecture by Keres.

http://www.chess.com/article/view/quotanalysis-of-a-difficult-positionquot-by-paul-keres