Customer Reviews

4th Candidates' Tournament, 1959 Bled-Zagreb-Belgrade September 7th - October 29th

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am a class A player in the USA. First the good news: Unlike most of the books by publisher Hardinge- Simpole this chess book is written in algebraic notation ! The tournament games between Mikhail Tal, Paul Keres, Tigran Petrosian, Vassily Smyslov, Svetozar Gligorich, Bobby Fischer, Fridrik Olaffson and Pal Benko are of the standard one would expect from a Candidates Tournament (although one wishes that Fischer had prepared a more varied repertoire against the Caro-Kann). So why only three stars? The annotations by Grandmaster Emeritus Harry Golombek are too sparse. The chess games themselves are readily available on most large databases of chess games so rating this book must be based largely on the annotations.
One wonders why the publisher updated this book into algebraic notation instead of translating the tournament book from German written by world class grandmaster Svetozar Gligorich and grandmaster Ragozin which has more extensive annotations.

Although books on the previous three Candidates' Tournaments had long been available, I was for a long time never able to obtain a book discussing the Candidates Tournament of 1959 that saw 22-year-old Mikhail Tal rise from relative obscurity to challenge and (briefly) overcome longtime World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik.

The tournament was, in terms of results, very unusual for a World championship cycle. The number of so-called "grandmaster draws" was very low for most of the tournament and there were an amazing number of wins with the Black pieces: Keres in fact suffered all his losses playing White. Some have though this reflects a poor standard of play because too many bad mistakes were made, but if one reads through "4th Candidates' Tournament, 1959", one will see that in fact there was a good deal of extremely impressive chess played. More than that, not all of it was of the aggressive tactical variety: there were a number of outstanding endgames - most famously the one with which Keres beat Tal and tried to overthrow him for the right to challenge Botvinnik, but also in such games as Keres' win over Smyslov in the second round and the two later games between Smyslov and Fischer where the endings were beautifully won by Black.

Then there are such combinative games as Petrosian's mating attack against Keres in the fourth round, where he sacrificed a rook and then his queen for an unexpected mate in the second session, and Tal's unusual win over Fischer where he completely tied up the future champion. More surprising and equally interesting is the way in which the two tailenders, Benkö and Ólafsson, consistently got into time trouble to the point of losing several games on time when they were not in dreadful positions. There are also some fascinating notes about what the players did on the journeys from Bled to Zagreb to Belgrade - and funnily of how they missed a train in the process!

The basic problem with the layout of "4th Candidates' Tournament, 1959" that forces me to deduct a star from my rating is the poor annotation. Only a fairly small number of critical moves are annotated, and the use of such marks as "!" for a good move and "?" for a bad move is not done nearly as frequently as it should be. Indeed, there are many cases where one does not see where the winner went right and the loser went wrong at all: there should be as few as possible of these.

Still, for that major problem, "4th Candidates' Tournament, 1959" is a very good read that looks at a tournament hihgly neglected in chess history and was perhaps better than some have thought.