Learning from Elders
In the last 12 years, trying to widen and deepen my chess culture, I have been buying chess books; mostly game collections of great Masters ( who are really Grandmasters) of the past.
Following the lead of players like Bronstein and Smyslov, and also from simaginfan, I have bought and explored, among others, the following:
1) The entire collection of Mc Donnell-La Bourdonnais 85 games, played throughout six matches in 1834! Now, this might seem too far away to matter, but consider this: Morphy, the great American genius, commented 31 games from this encounter. Fischer, in turn, considered Morphy to be the most accurate player that ever existed. How about that for learning from your elders?
Now, that game is ancient, right? 1834!
But check out how Vaganian used this same pattern to crush Reshevsky.
2) Next on my list is Chigorin, whom I did not know much about. After buying Jimmy Adam's masterpiece on Chigorin, oh my God, he became one of my heroes! He was promoting chess among the Russian people when the czars were still in power.
Chigorin was a pivotal figure, a predecessor in the creative realm to players like Geller, Smyslov and Tal! His philosophy of piece activity and fight for the initiative is a marker for the Russian and Soviet School of Chess! In some games, he made the great Steinitz look like a child!
Here is a Chigorin victory against the great Emanuel Lasker.
I will give one more example before going to the game that actually inspired this blog. This next example is by the great Lasker, who schools Alekhine. Years later, Alekhine said that he could not have become the player he became without Emanuel Lasker.
To summarize briefly the first part of this article, there are quite a number of great Masters, known and unknown, that could help any of us to improve our game. All it takes is a little bit of curiosity and openness of mind, to explore the great Masters of the past, all the way from Philidor to the present.
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Next we come to the game in question: it is a game by Bronstein, played at the Belgian Team Championship in 1996. Now, bear in mind that Bronstein was born in 1924, so in 1996 he was 72 years old!
And why this game? Because in his notes introducing the game, Bronstein mentions some concepts inherited from Masters of times past; and this is something that unfortunately modern GMs rarely do! In their interviews, I wish they would give some historical background~ This would stimulate young minds to explore real chess culture, and not just suggestions from an "engine", which is not even an engine, but a computer program...
