Customer Reviews

Championship Chess (Hardinge Simpole Chess Classic)

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the ussr absolute championship 1941 was one of the strongest chess tournaments ever held-botvinnik smyslov and keres were in it for a start and the players all met each other 4 times so it became a titanic struggle.botvinnik wrote the notes to this book-having won the event-and they are truly magnificent.his analysis is amazingly deep and authoritative as befits a future world champion. it was also a great dry run for botvinnik for his assault on the world championship in 1948.

the notation is descriptive but the book is well printed and very well stocked with exceptionally clear diagrams. everyone interested in the ussr, in the history of chess and in some really great games by top players annotated by a supreme expert will want to own this book.no chess library worth the name is complete without it.

Former World Chess Champion and Mastermind M.M. Botvinnik analyses the games at the 1941 ussr absolute championship with great attention to detail. At this tournament, where all the great Russian playes of the time met head to head, Botvinnik triumphed - thus creating the start of his amazing reign. In this volume, Botvinnik extracts the secrets of each game, whilst objectively analysing his own. This edition published by Hardinge and Simpole.

This pretentiously-named Absolute Championship was organized for political reasons. Lilienthal and Bondarevsky had tied for first in the USSR championship, and were to play off, while Botvinnik was only in the top six. But he was able to persuade the authorities that neither of the winners had a hope of challenging Alekhine for the world title, so asked for a match-tournament of the top six, which coincidentally was enough to include him!

However, in this tournament Botvinnik showed his amazing capacity to learn from his defeats. Of course he is famous for putting this capacity to such good use in later return matches for the world championship. He won this tournament by a huge margin, and won all his individual matches.

In my view, Botvinnik was the strongest player in the world after this tournament. The 1946 Groningen super-tourney and especially the 1948 World Championship match-tourney merely ratified what most of the chess world already knew--he was the best. Later on in his reign as world champ, he was, as he said, just first among equals, but before he won the title, he was a long way ahead of everyone.

This tournament book is also a good example of why he got so far ahead--his deep and objective analysis of his own and opponents' games.

Botvinnik came, saw, and conquered at this 1941 meet of the top Grandmasters in the USSR. At this time the old champions, Lasker, Capablanca and Alekhine were on their way out, and this outstanding tournament triumph by Botvinnik demonstrated without a shadow of doubt that a mighty new force was on the rise. In the tournament Botvinnik dominated Keres, Smyslov, Boleslavsky, Bondarevsky and Lilienthal. He then set about extracting the ultimate secrets from every game by dint of the most precise analysis. Experts regard this as perhaps the best tournament book ever written. In conjunction with Harry Golombek's book on the 1948 match tournament World Championship (also available from Hardinge Simpole) it provides the perfect introduction to the amazing reign of the great Botvinnik