When Mikhail Botvinnik lost the world championship in 1960 to the dazzling attacking player from Riga, Mikhail Tal, there seemed little chance of him regaining his title. Yet in the Return Match a year later, with a surprising demonstration of aggressive chess, Botvinnik completely outplayed his young opponent and ran out the easy winner. All 21 games of the match are deeply annotated.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Botvinnik: The Champion makes a comeback!,
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This review is from: Return Match for the World Chess Championship: Botvinnik Tal: Moscow 1961 (Progress in Chess) (Paperback)
The appeal of this book, as in several others published by Botvinnik's heirs after his death, lies in having one of the players commenting directly on the games. Of course, the famous Tal book on the 1960 Championship is a great companion to this one Tal-Botvinnik, 1960, but also take a look at Botvinnik vs. Bronstein, Moscow 1951 - Botvinnik and Botvinnik-Smyslov, which also give the Champion's thoughts as he plays in the various matches.
This book is especially interesting because Botvinnik lost the Championship to Tal the year before, and this rematch was thought to be Tal's opportunity to cement his historical claim as one of the best champions ever. Instead, Botvinnik somehow finds a way to win decisively. Tal never again played for the championship. The players are day and night: Botvinnik the positional player, building up an advantage and slowly pushing his opponent off the board. Tal, the tactical gunslinger, who could fire off a decisive shot no matter what the position on the board. Very entertaining reading and highly recommended.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better Than Most,
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This review is from: Return Match for the World Chess Championship: Botvinnik Tal: Moscow 1961 (Progress in Chess) (Paperback)
I can't agree with the review above, I think its just plain wrong. Botvinnik was a great world champion and is still widely regarded as one of the best annotators of chess games ever. This book is not his best but is still far better than most. The production values are first class, clean printing, strong binding and excellent notes.
As a competitor in the match Botvinnik is uniquely placed to comment and does. Without going into move by move comparisons I believe that there isn't another book on the match that is anywhere near as good. Most coverage of this match is little more than game scores as part of an anthology of World Championship matches. If you have an interest in world class chess, annotated by world class players you cannot do much better than this. Buy it, you'll learn from it.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
It's a pity this match was so little covered,
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This review is from: Return Match for the World Chess Championship: Botvinnik Tal: Moscow 1961 (Progress in Chess) (Paperback)
When he won the World Championship in 1960, Mikhail Tal was hailed as a super-champion who would hold the title. His aggressive, attacking play also served to revive interest in a game that had been seen as too boring by many before he emerged.
Surprisingly, Botvinnik in 1961 managed not only to regain his title in the last match before FIDE changed the rules, but also to win an unprecedented number of games in a "modern" title match. Because there was an unusual number of decisive games for a World Championship match, many have considere this a below-standard encounter and chess historians have given it relatively little coverage, often attributing the result to Tal's poor health. My examination of the games in this match as a teenager made me somewhat suspicious of this viewpoint, for there seemed to be few really obvious blunders made by Tal and at times I noticed him playing extremely well - for instance in the later part of the second game. Still, though Botvinnik's quietly-achieved victories in so many games of this match have always been more interesting to me than combative minatures that too often attract the attention of compilers of "best games of chess", I did not have the understanding I wished for of, say Botvinnik's wins in games such as the ninth, eleventh, thirteenth and fifteenth. Whilst this book does give some idea as to how Botvinnik achieved these and other wins, it has the same fault as my previous review on the 1951 Botvinnik-Bronstein Moscow match, namely that there is far too little emphasis given to important strong moves or to mistakes that cost the player who made them dearly. There is also too much difference between the opinion of moves in the book and that of more general books on the World Chess Championship - so that a reader like me is left confused. With the size of the book so smal, more detail would have been both possible and extremely welcome. On the whole, it is a shame there was not a really good coverage of the match at the time it was released, so that this book, even if written largely by Botvinnik himself and thus providing an unusually intimate look, still falls short of the highets standard.
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