The Budapest - Moscow Team Match. 1949. A Quick Look. Part Two.
Afternoon everyone. Back with some more wonderful games from the match. Only notes to one - the last one - to save time all round. ( there are lots of game notes in Griffin's wonderful blog linked to in Part One)
I finished last time with Salo Flohr exploiting the Bishop Pair. Kotov produced two games on the theme which could find a place in any text book.
Another game for the text books. I love endgames, as you probably know. Bronstein - like Tal, for example - was known for his creative chess. Both those guys were also very strong technically- something often overlooked. A Rook and Pawn endgame. Two open files. Exchange a pair of Rooks so that the defender can't cover both. Then this idea of pushing the a-Pawn to a3, with the permanent threat of ...Rb2, ties White down ( an idea I learned from a Duras - Rubinstein game ) Perhaps perfect defence could have held, but it's horrible for us humans over the board.
The mention of Szily always makes me smile. Two decades ago I was invited to a correspondence tournament by the then President of the iccf - not an offer easy to turn down! I was basically retired, but, expecting to be seeded, I thought I would see how it went. It turned out that the tournament was being run on the Szily system. When my pairings arrived, there was a note from the controller - who was a friend and a lovely man. It said ''Sorry Neil - welcome to the Silly System!''. With those pairings it would have been easier - ratings wise - to make a World Championship final than to make it into the next round!!
Back to the subject at hand, via one of my brilliant links!. Szily against the Moscow team captain and future Word Correspondence Chess Champion.
Averbakh was like me! He loved chess for itself. A student of endgames and chess history. Unlike me he was a terrific player! This one is in his best games book.
Let's give some Hungarian wins. Florian had a miserable time of it, but he did win a couple of games. He had to work for this one! Some very neat ideas at the end make it worth going through to the end.
Pal Benko is remembered for quite a few things - most famously ceding his World Championship qualifying place to Fischer. He was a fascinating chess story indeed. This is from Chess Life, which does not mention the fact that he was imprisoned twice - once as a prisoner of war, I think, and once for trying to defect to the USA. (I really must - at some point - add him to the blogs I have written about Hungarian players. He was also a high class study composer in his later years. Quite a man!)
Here the future Grandmaster beats the Moscow captain - yet another game from the match on the theme of the Bishop Pair.
So, onto Gideon Barcza. His games would not appeal to so many, but I absolutely adore his chess! Like Rubinstein he had the ability to charm a win out of nowhere. Think of a snake-charmer quietly hypnotising a cobra and curling it up quietly into a basket. Like Averbakh he was an endgame expert and a wonderful writer on chess history. At the start of Part One I gave a shot of the cross-table of the event from this wonderful book.
It was compiled by Istvan Bilek, with, if I remember rightly, some help from the wonderful Hungarian chess historians Bottlik and Foldeak. I have managed to find a translatable copy of the introduction. An excerpt.
''Our book tries to find answers to these questions in the rich life of the international grandmaster Gedeon Barcza and gives a sketchy, cross-sectional account of the beginnings, unfolding and fulfilment of an unbroken chess career.
It is a painful loss of our chess life that the grandmaster no longer had time to make his experiences, chess approach, successes and experiences public in the framework of a life's work report. Very characteristically, he was more concerned with the 3rd volume of the Hungarian Chess History, but he overestimated his strengths and had to leave this work to Árpád Földeák, and then the unexpected death knocked the pen out of his hands for good.
Obviously, volumes will be needed to present the multifaceted work of Gedeon Barcza, as he was an outstandingly successful player of our country for more than half a century (eight-time champion, eight-time Olympian, 29-time national team player) and at the same time a senior contributor to the Hungarian Chess World, the editor of the Hungarian Chess Life and, as is obvious to everyone today, the teacher of generations. His work ethic, professional exactingness, and literary-level presentation skills (both orally and in writing) were legendary. We have made a large selection of his legacy and analyses, so - wherever possible - his writings and analyses will appear on the pages of our book. Quoting his favourite poet, Mihály Babits - "oh I am the omega and the alpha" - we approached the world of mood, but of course we also wanted to depict the other letters of the "alphabet": the lowercase and uppercase letters, then the punctuation marks, or even the parentheses, which were just as much a part of his life as - for example - the musical pauses.
Above all, we set ourselves the goal of allowing his games and analyses to live their own lives, so that the collection will be able to draw the profile and portrait of the grandmaster on its own.
The magic of his personality is quite special, still alive today: the sense of vocation of the man of the spirit illuminates every written line and sentence, in addition to squeezing the eternal truths found like a tire (?) with a sense of duty as a teacher. The inner laws of chess and the development of his peculiar "Barcza-like" architecture are evidenced by his every game and every move.''
The game notes given were to this beautiful game.
In the book that game is followed by this one.
Let's link into the final game with this picture - via my friend !TUUR on bluesky. Szabo - Barcza. 1960 Hungarian Championship play-offs.
From memory that game is in Szabo's wonderful best games book. If you ever get the chance to get hold of a copy, grab it! It's a wonderful book. The notes to this final game are from it.
Smyslov may have been the dominant force in the match, but Szabo - despite a double error - absolutely smashed him with Black in one of his opponent's favourite opening lines.. A beautiful game.
Yeah, this was not such a 'quick look', but what can you do? I am just an insatiable studier of chess games! I hope you enjoyed it. Cheers guys.
