The first match USSR vs. the rest of the world took place from March 29th to April 4th 1970 in Belgrade.
Each team had nominated 10 players for the boards 1-10 and two reserve players who could be used on any board. 20 of the top 22 were playing, with all 24 nominees from the top 30. A chess fever in Belgrade. 63 journalists were reporting.
All positions in the photographs are taken from the encounters on day one.
Board one Boris Spassky-Bent Larsen and board two Bobby Fischer-Tigran Petrosian
Board three Viktor Korchnoi-Lajos Portisch and board four Vlastimil Hort-Lev Polugajevsky
Board five Efim Geller-Svetozar Gligoric and board six Samuel Reshevsky-Vassily Smyslov
Board eight Milan Matulovic-Michail Botvinnik and board seven Mark Taimanov-Wolfgang Uhlmann
Board nine Michail Tal-Miguel Najdorf and board ten Borislav Ivkov-Paul Keres
I was in a discussion about the Admiral Nakhimov chess set. The thread is gone, as the thread maker's account is closed for abuse, and so the discussion, too, was discontinued. Among other things, it had been a thread made by a customer to promote the great work available from the manufacturer ERWoodLeatherShop of Kharkiv, Ukraine, producing under conditions of the ongoing war. So, maybe I can bring just a little bit of that attention back.
The question I had discussed was, which of the pieces of admiral Nakhimov's chess set represented the king and which the queen? There are two photographs:
While the upper colour photo from the Moscow museum places the piece with the finial on the king's square, the older b/w presentation has the pieces without finial on the kings' squares.
The thread presented two sets from ERWoodLeatherShop. One was a reproduction of a 'Tal' set (and a very nice one). The other one was a reproduction of the 'Admiral Nakhimov'. In that set, we find a finial on the piece that was without finial in above pics, and the piece is the king in that reproduced set.
I had put in question this decision of the makers of the repro, for the following two reasons: 1) The well-known Poltava set is a set that has a king with a round finial and a 'bald' queen, and the same could go for the Nakhimov:
My partner in discussion claimed that the piece lacking a finial in the original Nakhimov, nevertheless, was a piece with masculine features, whereas the piece with the ball on top was one with feminine features- a typical way to distinguish king and queen. I responded that the Russian name for the queen traditionally was 'ferz', denominating a counsellor of the king and not a queen, and that, therefore, the king still might be the more slender and elegant piece with the finial.
I decided to simply ask Kate of ERWoodLeatherShop. I had a very friendly exchange of messages, her answers always being quick and refreshing.
-First of all, she sent me a photo from an original set from Poltava, Ukraine, with the good news that they were just working on a reproduction right now. How's that for timing?
King and queen:
Concerning the Nakhimov, she stated that they had had no photos of the original finial and authored it themselves! And they decided to put a finial on the piece that had none, because in the photo from the museum it looked more massive and taller, so that they took it for the king(- backing up the argument of my adversary, of course). As for the use of 'ferz' she said that, in her childhood, they only ever called the queen 'queen'!
A couple of days ago, finally, I got a message that ERWoodLeatherShop- Kate and her husband- finished their Poltava reproduction of the early original version they have!
As to the original poster of that thread, while I do not bear your behaviour (you certainly don't like mine) we were in a discussion and I would have liked to continue it. I hope you already got your Tal set by now, and that it is lovely.
A closed account is not a solution but a station on the journey, a new train will have another name, I guess
Yerevan, 1962- The photo from Tal-Krogius in the Soviet Championship that inspired the first recreation of a 'Tal' set by Chuck Grau and Noj.
A photo from the ERWoodLeatherShop
Thanks for reading