Aivar Gipslis Revisited. Part One.

A nice picture in my previous blogs of Koblencs and Gipslis

put me in mind of the Latvian trio who ruled chess in that country from the mid 1950's onwards - up until Shirov.  Tal, Gipslis and Klovans, Well, perhaps I will do a blog on Klovans at some point. Another of 'the forgotten and neglected'.

It is a shame that Latvia was not able to play independently at the time.

My long time readers will know that I love Gipslis' chess. The relevant blog is here :-   https://www.chess.com/blog/simaginfan/aivars-gipslis-some-games-and-pictures   

So I went into Gipslis' own book

and had a great time going over some games. So, just some games - some with notes, some without - and pictures, plus a couple of personal thoughts. My usual fare.

Both Gipslis and Klovans were dual Grandmasters - both over the board ( Klovans getting that title is interesting in itself ) and in correspondence chess. Gipslis got the title by winning the strong Alekhine Memorial - two world champions and some other very notable names there.

Some old style correspondence chess to begin with then.

This first one is a close as I will come to the 'fun game' I generally try to include. It ends with a horror blunder for a c.c. game - quite possibly a clerical error - but you get the chance of solving the little puzzle finding the refutation.

The decisive game from the Alekhine memorial was a massacre! The loser - 

was a good player!  

https://www.ecforum.org.uk/viewtopic.php?t=13220    Well, he walked into a favourite line of Gipslis - I presume he had prepared it - but went horribly wrong. Ouch!

I know nothing about Gipslis' opponent in this next game, so a nice picture from the Black Book.

While I am here, I will throw in another Nc3/Bb5 Sicilian from the earlier Gipslis blog - for those who have not seen it and don't visit that blog.

Well, room for two more games - I always think six is a good number for these little selections (  and end up choosing about 20!!) This one came to mind just this week following the World Cup, in one of my chains of thought. Many years ago I annotated a game of Micky Adams where he was White in a Ruy Lopez. He played d3, Nc3, h3 and a3. My comment on that setup - used by Anderssen 130 years earlier - was ''Yesterday's load of old rubbish - how terrible were those guys! - is today's deep subtlety'', or words to that effect!

The Hungarian Defence was introduced nearly two centuries ago to avoid that new discovery The Evans Gambit. Now 2700 players, who know so much, are playing it to avoid the debate of whether you should play ...a6 or ...a5 in the Italian, and hours spent memorising cloud engine analysis of 3...Bc5. It was basically condemned as too passive by the 1870's, and was hardly played for 150 years! Anyway, onto the game - it's rather nice!  Gipslis doing his Alekhine impersonation and switching from play on the Queen's-side to an attack on the King. Radulov could seriously play by the way!

So, to put some pieces together of how I got here and that Koblencs - Gipslis picture, I will finish with this one. An opening line that runs through these blogs - both players played both sides of it, and we all studied it back in the day. Trainer and student. Gipslis was also a trainer.

I deliberately didn't annotate that one. Instead I present the bare score - given as it is in the Black Book. That is how I first studied it. Hopefully you will follow in my footsteps, so to speak, and study it for yourself. If you want to do notes - with or without engine help - and post them in the comments that would be great!

I recently made a comment on my friend  @zoranepe  latest - wonderful - blog and was happy to see that he is old school like me! We still study games like we did back when I first got the Gipslis book. Before databases we cherished such books and went over every move, every note, and were in awe of these wonderful players!

I can not imagine how many games I have studied from bare game scores. On a real chessboard, with various things wedged on the pages to keep the book flat. I had 3 pieces of white card, cut to various shapes, to cover up the game score so that I would not accidentally see the next move on the page. Ah, I am getting old!

See you next time, when I have decided which six games from so many to share! cheers guys!