Yes, I Like Annotated Games! (Part I)
Recently GM Serper wrote a nice article titled "Do You Like Annotated Games?", and my response is a resounding "YES!".
Some Grandmasters are not only great players, but also great people and great teachers. They have my unbounded admiration both as people and as players. Some of them faced great adversity (like Keres and Bronstein, not to mention Lasker) and yet retained that quiet dignity and noble qualities which I find so endearing.
Polugaevsky was so nice, Botvinnik thought he was TOO NICE! Botvinnik, in order to motivate himself for an upcoming opponent, he used to try to hate the opponent, which is a technique that Korchnoi and others also used; a technique which was criticized by Bronstein.
From a Bronstein interview (2003):
STAKHOV: But your idea is not compatible with how much money is now spinning in chess. No one will give money for rapid chess. If you had played a rapid chess match with Botvinnik, then…
BRONSTEIN:
"In a way there was no reason to win the match against Botvinnik. My Father returned from prison, he was sitting in the audience, even though he wasn’t supposed to be in Moscow. In the audience was also Abakumov; although he was a great supporter of my Dynamo Club, the highest establishment wanted to see Botvinnik as a champion. He had an image of amateur, an engineer who is moving pieces only in his free time. As a matter of fact he killed Soviet chess. He looked his opponents with such hatred! It is an entire school of hatred stirrers: Lasker, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov. Kasparov, even if a computer beat him, he would lose anything now. Let us get intrigue back in chess. If you lose, give the money back. Only then will people come back to chess. And if both art of chess and results are there, it will then bring about chess revival. As long as there is only one outcome, chess is not interesting to anyone, except to those who are accepting and those who are making bets."
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Yet Tal was so nice a human being, Botvinnik could not hate him, and commented (I paraphrase from memory): "Isn't it wonderful, to be loved by everyone?"
Both Polugaevsky and Tal are great chess writers. Others that come to mind are Tartakower, Nimzowitsch, Keres and Smyslov. Kramnik and Anand are quite incredible.
In many of my blogs I have taken the time and trouble to present games annotated by the players, and the purpose of this post is to present a compilation of games with annotations by great players, games which have appeared in some of my blog posts.
So here we go! I believe there is a certain maximum number of games I can include in a blog post (maybe 10?), so here is Part I of this compilation:
The following game is annotated by Paul Morphy!
Another game commented by Morphy!
