What about Joel Lautier? (Please forgive me if I misspelled his name) He was one of only a few of Kasparov's contemporaries who gave Garry trouble.
Why is Nezhetdinov not so famous?
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May 8, 2018
0
#43
Heather_Stephens wrote:
SmyslovFan wrote:
Good call on Planinc! Fuderer was another great attacking player who isn't well remembered. A GM who really knew how to attack who should be remembered better is Lutikov. He was able to create some amazing games.
That's not quite true. I'm a Londoner and I saw him win at Wimbledon a couple of years ago. A sublime attacking player.
Ummm.... Ok.?
May 8, 2018
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#44
At the risk of becoming tedious, I'll add another name to the list of excellent players from the past who aren't as well remembered as they should be: Vladas Mikenas. His best performance according to chessmetrics.com was 2742 at Riga in 1959, where he defeated Tal and finished the tournament in second place, half a point behind Spassky. In 1945, the same source has him as the #12 player in the world. He did not become a GM until FIDE awarded him the honorary title in 1987, when Mikenas was 77 years old.
May 8, 2018
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#45
Heather_Stephens wrote:
That's not quite true. I'm a Londoner and I saw him win at Wimbledon a couple of years ago. A sublime attacking player.
Roger that.
May 8, 2018
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#46
Please explain. Was there some sort of quota system so that Russia could only have a maximum number of grand masters? Seems unfair if true.
May 8, 2018
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#47
OldPatzerMike ???????:
At the risk of becoming tedious, I'll add another name to the list of excellent players from the past who aren't as well remembered as they should be: Vladas Mikenas. His best performance according to chessmetrics.com was 2742 at Riga in 1959, where he defeated Tal and finished the tournament in second place, half a point behind Spassky. In 1945, the same source has him as the #12 player in the world. He did not become a GM until FIDE awarded him the honorary title in 1987, when Mikenas was 77 years old.
Mikenas is well-known.?
Heather_Stephens escreveu:
Please explain. Was there some sort of quota system so that Russia could only have a maximum number of grand masters? Seems unfair if true.
Back in those days, when FIDE introduced the titles of Grandmaster and International Master (the title Grandmaster had been around for 100 years or more, but was only loosely defined as a player who had won an international tournament consisting of other internationally recognized masters), there were fewer than 100 grandmasters in the entire world, and the title was very difficult to attain. Also, and this is still the case today, to be awarded the grandmaster title you had to achieve the required result in international competition with players from at least three or four different countries in each tournament. In other words, you couldn't win the grandmaster title by doing well in the Soviet or the US Championship, for instance. Bobby Fischer became grandmaster aged 15 by virtue of his result in the Interzonal Tournament (i.e. by qualifying for the Candidates Tournament).
This requirement made it very, very difficult for Soviet players to become grandmasters, because the Soviet authorities restricted the number of players who were allowed to go abroad to play.
DeirdreSkye escreveu:
The restriction for Nezhmetdiov was because he was a high ranked army officer.
No, Nezhmetdinov wasn't an army officer. He was demobbed as a lieutenant in 1946, but before the war he was a manual labourer (working as a stoker among many things). He wasn't allowed to play abroad for the simple fact that, although a strong player, there were many more who were much stronger than him. He only played three tournaments abroad, one in Germany in 1946, Bucharest 1954, and Varna 1967. After the war, he worked as chess trainer in his native Kazan, I believe.
May 8, 2018
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#51
Do you have the book, @batgirl? I've never seen it, nor an English translation of it.
mickynj: Yes, virtually impossible in those days when his opportunities for international appearances were limited to Hastings and other international events which happened to take place in the United Kingdom, or whenever big international tournaments happened to coincide with his holidays and took place in a friendly country! That said, Alexander actually did play in Belgrade in 1952. Not quite behind the Iron Curtain, but fairly close.
Nezhmetdinov's own best games collections is available from Amazon and Abebooks.
May 9, 2018
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#54
Well I have a conspiracy theory that since he's a Tartar,Russians didn't want him to be known better than Russian players. I think some kind of racism played outta there.
May 9, 2018
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#55
@Deidre There was other Russian chess players who served in for example military factories but they were let join the international tournaments.Let someone remind me the name of that GM
But that wasn't the case with Nezhmetdinov (he only served in the army during World War II, he wasn't a career army officer). He wasn't given the opportunities to play abroad because the number of opportunities were extremely few and travel abroad was severely restricted, and they went often to non-Russians, such as the Estonian Keres, the Armenian Petrosian, the Hungarian(!) Lilienthal, the Czech(!) Flohr, the Belorussian Bronstein, the Ukrainian Geller etc. (the last five were also Jewish, just like Korchnoi, Taimanov, and Averbakh). Not only Russians like Smyslov and Botvinnik (the latter was also a Jew, by the way). This, of course, led to a lot of 'politics' and wheeling and dealing, before it was decided who was allowed to go, and typically it was only the very best in those days. Averbakh wrote about this in his autobiography. In the 70s and 80s more players were given opportunities to go abroad and play, but it was still not that many.
Just like I think Creedence Clearwater Revivak could have been more famous if not for its name.
Mar 27, 2019
0
#59
HolographWars wrote:
Just like I think Creedence Clearwater Revivak could have been more famous if not for its name.
Replacing the final K with an L finally go them up around the bend.
I'd say Nezhmetdinov probably is the most famous player to never have been anywhere close to be top ten. He played a few Soviet Championships and usually finished near the bottom of the field, and peaked just below top 20 at Chessmetrics. Still he is quite well known compared to many players that scored better results.
Good call on Planinc! Fuderer was another great attacking player who isn't well remembered. A GM who really knew how to attack who should be remembered better is Lutikov. He was able to create some amazing games.
That's not quite true. I'm a Londoner and I saw him win at Wimbledon a couple of years ago. A sublime attacking player.