Customer Reviews

World Championship Candidates' Tournament - Holland 1956

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Winning the candidates' competition is the ultimate and uniquely necessary passport to achievement of glory on the World Chess Championship stage.

Only four contenders in the organised history of the World Chess Championship have ever succeeded in winning the "Candidates" twice - these were Spassky, Korchnoi, Karpov and Vassily Smyslov.


Having won the 1953 Candidates and drawn with Botvinnik in 1954, Smyslov returned to the charge with an equally devastating performance in the 1956 qualifier, surging ahead of Keres, Bronstein , Spassky , Geller and Petrosian. Combined with the companion Hardinge Simpole volume on the World Championship Candidates Tournament of 1953 this book completes a record of staggering tournament expertise and determination by the immortal Smyslov.


The author is well known journalist Barry Wood, member of the English Olympiad team, Chess Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and for many years Editor-in-Chief of Chess Magazine, ably assisted by the former German (latterly Irish/South African) master Wolfgang Heidenfeld. As before the eye witness accounts guarantee the accuracy and depth of the notes

The 1956 Amsterdam Candidates Tournament gave Vassily Smyslov a passeage to a second World Championship match with Mikhail Botvinnik.

This reprint of the original tournament book from the late 1950s, although at times the text is extremely fuzzy (it is only a reprint after all) gives a very good account of all the games played during the 1956 Candidates tournament, explaining very clearly how games were won, lost and drawn. There is always a clear understanding of what the players were doing throughout each game in the tournament, and its progress is monitored much more closely than any simple book on chess history or even many previous books I have read on World Championship matches.

There is also an excellent section dealing with the background to the tournament and how the contestants were expected to perform - and how they did.

An impressive document, easy to read despite the outdated (but familiar to me) descriptive notation used to make the reprint more affordable. Excellent investment for anybody interested in Chess.