The Chess Mind

The first ever drawn world chess championship match was also the shortest (not counting the FIDE k.o. finales) and one of the scrappiest. Emanuel Lasker, world champion for an astounding 27 years (1894-1921) and Austrian great Carl Schlechter put on a great 10 game show, with Lasker saving his title by winning the last game. (There's a great deal of controversy about this that I won't get into, but that interested readers can undoubtedly pursue with a bit of web browsing.)

Games 5 and 10 (the players' sole wins) are both worthy of attention, but we'll take a slight deviation from the norm and look at game 7. Schlechter, with White, immediately goes after his opponent, but Lasker quickly and willingly joins the brawl. The game is a constant fight for the initiative with both players taking significant risks to try to win. Neither succeeds, ultimately, but complex, fighting draws like this are worth more than many a routine win.

Click here to see the game, here for directions on watching the show (live if you can make it at 9 p.m. EDT; in the archives if you can't), and here for a list of games covered in past shows.

In the 1970s, Yugoslavian chess featured at least three wild men: Ljubomir Ljubojevic, Dragoljub Velimirovic, and Albin Planinc. The first was one of the world's best players for over a decade, the second is also pretty well-known thanks not just to his games but the variation of the 6.Bc4 Sozin involving queenside castling, but the third, Planinc, is almost completely unknown nowadays. And that's a pity, because the brilliant, razor-sharp chess he played in his prime would make him a fan favorite today.

So this week, we'll take a first step in remedying this, as we examine his 1975 game with Dragoljub Minic from Rovinj/Zagreb tournament. Neither player had a good event, but their game was a real donnybrook with sacrifices, counter-sacrifices and all sorts of fascinating material imbalances. For most of the game, the position was completely unclear, but eventually Planinc's brilliant handling of the complications led to a fatal Minic error and our star brought home the point.

It was a great game, and as a bonus, a theoretically significant game as well, at least for those who play or allow the Archangelsk Variation of the Ruy. So nuke some popcorn and gather around your flat panels or CRTs this Monday for another great game - hope to see you then!

As always, directions for watching the show (free live, about 25 cents after the fact in the permanent archives) can be found here, while a list of games from previous shows is available here.

Some draws are dull, but not all of them - this one had even the IMs and GMs in the internet audience oohing and aahing!

Click here.

One of the world's strongest players when I was a kid - one of the very few not from the Soviet Union - was Yugoslav great Svetozar Gligoric. Grandmaster, many-time candidate for the world championship, theoretician and all-around good guy, Gligoric was a very important figure on the world chess scene from the early 1950s through the 1980s.

It is thus long overdue that I present a Gligoric victory, and so this week we'll take a look at a power performance in his one of his opening specialties, the White side of the Nimzo-Indian Defense. In fact, we'll kill two birds with one stone by presenting an old (Budapest 1948) game against the then Hungarian, now American GM Pal Benko, featuring a plan Botvinnik developed and made famous in what I think is the most overrated game in chess history, Botvinnik's 1938 win over Capablanca at the AVRO tournament.

The Gligoric win is a great game (as is the Botvinnik-Capa game, despite its excessive fame), and the plan is an extremely important one that can be easily learned and utilized in a wide array of situations. So tune in this Monday night - it's an enjoyable game, but better still, your rating may well thank you!

Two postscripts. First, the usual one: information about how to watch the show either live or in the archives can be found here. (By the way, watching the show is free, in case some of my readers have avoided tuning in from a fear of paying or a desire to be frugal.)

Second, I have finished adding background information about all the previous shows' games, which can be found here.

As you can see (see the previous post), I've updated (literally!) the link with the list of games covered in my previous ChessBase shows, and have, most importantly, started to fill in more details about the games.

Though I've only covered the first 30 shows so far (I'll finish the rest a bit at a time), the additions include the games' ECO code and a brief description of each game's action and/or significance.

Hopefully readers will find this helpful.

The late Estonian GM Paul Keres, who died 30 years ago today, was my first favorite player, and to this day he remains one of my favorites. At one time the greatest player never to become world champion, and with Korchnoi the person who came the closest to becoming champion for the longest period without ever quite making it, Keres was arguably a top 5 player for a period of nearly 30 years and a world-class GM for about 40.

Among his many accomplishments are two first places in Candidates' events (Semmering 1937 and AVRO 1938), four seconds (1953, 1956, 1959 and 1962), third place in the 1948 World Championship, strong performances in two other Candidates' events, first place in three Soviet Championships (and second in two others), not to mention countless other match and tournament victories of lesser significance.

He was in addition an outstanding chess writer, an important theorist, a national hero and an all-around well-liked person. In short, a great player, and one worth emulating.

To commemorate this legend of the game, we'll take a look at his late-round victory over Mikhail Tal from the 1959 Candidates' Tournament. Tal won with an outstanding 20/28 (can you imagine some of today's GMs playing in such a monster event? It might take them years to recover!), but Keres' 18.5/28 score - which would have been good enough by percentage to win any other Candidates' tournament in the FIDE history of the game - kept things exciting. Further, in their mini-match, Keres beat Tal 3-1 (and only lost the one game on a blunder).

The game we'll look at in our show this week was a magnificent battle: Keres desperately needed to win, and despite having the Black pieces managed to outplay Tal in the opening and early middlegame. Tal defended extremely resourcefully, though, and it was only Keres' dogged and highly accurate technique that brought home the point.

It's a very well-played game and interesting from start to finish, and quite instructive, too: there are points of genuine interest in the opening, middlegame, endgame, and from the psychological side of things as well. So I hope you'll join me this week, and I think those of you who do will be glad you did!

(As always, directions for watching the show can be found here, while a list of past shows' games can be found here.)