Book of the Month
Ben Graff with the best new writing and the greatest classics under one roof … in association with Forward Chess
‘It’s hard to imagine another spectator sport where the audience could be as animated as at a chess tournament. It’s enough to move your eyes a bit, and from the fiery passion of one game you’d get to the quiet calmness of another one.’
- Grigori Roshal (Quoted in Masterpieces and Dramas of the Soviet Championships Volume II (1938-47) by Sergey Voronkov)
There is nothing quite like a chess tournament. Perhaps the best moment comes immediately prior to the first round, when everyone is still cheerful, hopeful, when the mistakes are yet to be made and all things seem possible. Every event is its own world within a world, an opportunity to be the best we can be, a chance to lose ourselves in the game we love.
From our own battles at the board, through to the enjoyment that comes with witnessing others squirm while we watch on sagely, there are few better ways to spend time than in the tournament hall. Yet perhaps the next best thing is to relive the great events our chess heroes have taken part in, to learn more of their struggles at the board, and to gain a better understanding of the players as people, with their distinct personalities. It takes the very best writers to get us up close to the action.
This month, we explore three books that all centre on chess tournaments. Masterpieces and Dramas of the Soviet Championships Volume II (1938-47) by Sergey Voronkov and Tata Steel Chess Tournament 2021 by Daniel Fernandez are our contemporary offerings. We then go back one hundred years for this month’s classic, London 1922 by Geza Maróczy.
Next time you play in a tournament, whatever your result, you can console yourself that the very best have trodden the same path in the past. We are all destined to have good days and bad days. This month’s books encapsulate what it is about chess tournaments that draws us in. That keeps us wanting to go again. They are all a fitting tribute to the noblest of sporting encounters.
Masterpieces and Dramas of the Soviet Championships –`Volume II (1938 – 1947)
by Sergey Voronkov (Elk and Ruby)
‘The sporting struggle of the tournament is very exciting, but the other, creative side of chess is equally important. Tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of our vast country’s chess players will analyse these games, study them, learn from them as examples of chess art. The tournament participants know about that – and that’s why they think about their moves so intently…’
- Alexander Kotov – Ogonyok, No.25, 1940. (Quoted in Masterpieces and Dramas)
In 2021 the first volume of Masterpieces and Dramas of the Soviet Championships was the well-deserved winner of the English Chess Federation Book of the Year. The ECF jury noted that Sergey Voronkov’s seminal work read ‘…like a novel. A most remarkable, absorbing, and entertaining chess history which fully lives up to its title, Masterpieces and Dramas, on and off the board.’ Now Volume II is out, and it is every bit as exceptional as its predecessor.
Voronkov highlights that ‘The images of chess players here are quite different from those we knew from books. They are more nuanced, controversial, warts and all…. I wanted you to see the chess players as they were known by their peers: in development, in creative crisis, in constant struggle with themselves and their rivals.’
What follows is a brilliantly sourced, anecdote-rich telling of the battle for national supremacy within the strongest chess-playing nation on the planet. These struggles at the board took place during the darkest of times. It is as much history as it is chess history. Any student would get a better sense of what it must have felt like to live through these bloody years from this contribution than a conventional textbook.
Voronkov quotes the Soviet competitor Romanov who noted that ‘In 1937-1938 a huge wave of arrests surged the country. Then the endless trials began, which were all over the place in the newspapers.’ This was an era when anyone in the Soviet Union could be denounced, imprisoned, or executed entirely arbitrarily, and many were.
Romanov went on to write that ‘The fear of the punitive system was so great that we even stopped being scared. We pushed it down into the subconscious, otherwise you just couldn’t live. You just knew that at any moment you could be thrown into the grinder of prisons, deportations, camps, executions, but you didn’t think of it…’
Indeed, the action in volume II opens with Nikolai Krylenko, who had doubled as both the head of Soviet chess and the nation’s top prosecutor, being arrested and executed as the purges began to swallow up their own. A man who had pursued the ridiculous notion that chess could be viewed only through a political prism and had played such a large part in the denunciation of many chess players showed through his downfall that no one was safe, no matter how ingratiated with the Soviet regime a person considered him or herself to be.
Within the broader historical tapestry, Voronkov brings to life the Soviet Championships of the period through a host of contemporary (and more recent) recollections and sources, including newspapers, cartoons, player anecdotes and eighty-four games and extracts, often annotated by the players themselves.
Despite the immense strength of the Soviet chess stars, I was struck that they appeared to be sceptical of each other’s ability. Botvinnik reflected that ‘The conclusion is obvious: our masters, as a rule, lack positional technique.’ Viktorov wrote in similar vein that ‘The endgame technique of quite a few players is still poor, and, as Levenfish rightfully noted, even the masters probably should take some kind of an “endgame exam”.’ Botvinnik himself was not immune from criticism. On winning a pawn against him for the fourth game in a row, Bondarevsky was heard to remark, ‘I wonder how this man can be the Soviet Champion?’
Botvinnik emerges as the lead protagonist in Masterpieces and Dramas. This was a time when the ailing and alcoholic Alekhine was world champion. Whoever was seen as the top Soviet player would be recognised as his most legitimate challenger, and Botvinnik had his eye firmly on the prize.
Voronkov acknowledges that he has been criticised for his somewhat negative portrayal of Botvinnik in Volume I and he may well be criticised on this point again here, but for me his portrait feels about right. He neatly captures what it was like to watch Botvinnik in action – ‘The tournament participants circle around Botvinnik’s board, watch his every single move, his every gesture. But he’s withdrawn, self-absorbed, suspicious, he asks everyone to step away from the board.’
Voronkov goes on to give a detailed account of Botvinnik’s various political manoeuvres. These include highlighting that Botvinnik apparently took over from the loathed Krylenko as the Head of the Soviet Chess Federation for a year. While there are no records of any decisions Botvinnik personally took in this capacity, this was certainly a dubious position to hold at the height of the purges.
Voronkov also illustrates the careful way in which Botvinnik laid the groundwork for issuing a challenge to Alekhine by courting senior Soviet officials such as Molotov. At another point when he ran into opposition to a contest, he skilfully worked to have a different dissenting official removed from his position.
Botvinnik always had an answer to any question. When challenged as to how he could bring himself to take on an antisemitic communist hater, he ‘… answered coldly that if he didn’t play a match with Alekhine, then Euwe would declare himself world champion, then lose a match to Reshevsky, and the world champion’s title would forever stay in America.’
It might seem today that there was a certain inevitability surrounding Botvinnik’s climb to the summit of world chess, but this was not how things appeared in the early 1940s to his two predecessors as world champion. Capablanca placed both himself and Paul Keres ahead of Botvinnik as worthy contenders. Alekhine in similar vein, when asked who his main competitor was, simply pointed at Keres and said, ‘There he is.’
The little matter of playing poorly in the 12th Soviet Championships in 1940, and trailing in sixth, threatened to be an even bigger problem when it came to Botvinnik’s legitimacy as a world title challenger. However, he proceeded to blame his reversal on the acoustics in the playing hall and with great political skill set about creating a new contest, the ‘Absolute Championship,’ to reassert his supremacy. Lilienthal, who had been the joint victor in 1940 noted that ‘This news was a bolt out of the blue. I was seething.’ Voronkov notes that even twenty-five years later, Keres’ naivete meant that he ‘…still couldn’t understand the depth of Botvinnik’s scheme’.
Yet these were such difficult times, and even Botvinnik was not immune to the challenges they presented. When Leningrad fell to the Germans in World War II, he needed special permission to be on one of the last trains out of the city and was initially sent to chop wood in the forests, before seeking and getting a special dispensation from Molotov to continue with his chess.
The travails of another player, Levenfish, also aptly sum up the chaos and misery inherent in war. Levenfish wrote, ‘The harsh winter of 1941 was approaching. The fierce Urals colds reached minus 52 degrees. The plant barely had enough firewood for the production lines, and there was nothing left to heat the apartment blocks. In the night, grabbing my sled, saw and hatchet, I would cut down a birch in a restricted area, cut it up for firewood and drag it home.’ He goes on to tell the story of an eighteen-mile walk on foot followed by a journey in a freezing railway truck which he was fortunate to survive on his journey to safety.
The truth is that I could happily write ten different reviews of Masters and Dramas of the Soviet Championships Volume II, such is its quality. Here, I have only been able to give a flavour of some of the stories and themes, but any reader will happily discover so much more that is fascinating and insightful about this book.
Voronkov originally started out on this project with the intention of writing ‘a dozen or so articles’ and ‘leaving it at that’. Thank goodness he chose to continue. For me, this is the definitive work on an era that will always be remembered for the struggles it wrought on and off the board. A wonderful contribution, destined to take its place in the very first rank of brilliant chess histories.
Tata Steel Chess Tournament 2021
by Daniel Fernandez (Thinkers Publishing)
‘Finally, today was the day: playing chess with real pieces and boards again!’
- Michael Hoetmer (quoted in Tata Steel Chess Tournament 2021)
What better way to move on from lockdown than with a major chess tournament? They do not come any bigger than Wijk aan Zee, and, as Herman Grooten notes in his preface, the event is sometimes known as the ‘Wimbledon of chess’. Daniel Fernandez has produced an epic worthy of any grand slam.
Fernandez dedicates 794 pages to this single event, compared with the 524 pages Voronkov utilised to cover ten years of the Soviet Championships, in Volume II of Masterpieces and Dramas. This level of depth has its pros and cons. However, it is unlikely that future generations will have any need to look beyond Fernandez’s contribution to gain a full understanding of the Tata Steel event.
As a grandmaster himself, Fernandez was of course well placed to analyse the games, and he supplemented his own eye with intensive engine work and internet research, allowing him to look deeply and learn a lot. It is impossible to fault his effort, and the care he has shown, in his quest to uncover and share the full story.
There are elements of Tata Steel Chess Tournament that are perhaps a little puzzling. The games are analysed on a player-by-player basis from the perspective of the white pieces, starting with those of Alexander Donchenko who came last, and working through the field in reverse order. Trying out a different format is to be applauded, but a more conventional round-by-round telling might have heightened the tension.
To a significant extent, this is a book that centres on very deep opening analyses. As such it breaks new ground but goes beyond what most club players (and certainly this one) need and can easily follow. That said, while this is probably not a work that most of us will study every page of, it is something that can be dipped in and out of happily enough. The games I did play through I enjoyed. Equally, readers can of course pick and choose how deep they want to go, and Fernandez does provide a lot of insightful and more general commentary to draw on.
In terms of the event itself, Jorden Van Foreest truly announced himself on the world stage, claiming victory ahead of Anish Giri in a blitz play-off, after both scored 8.5/ 13. Meanwhile Caruana was placed fourth and a since resurgent world champion Carlsen limped home in sixth. It seems the result came as something of a surprise to Van Foreest, who modestly noted ‘To come first would be bizarre. I could never have expected this before the tournament, I was placed as one of the lowest.’
Yet, while everybody rightly heralded Van Foreest’s monumental breakthrough on the world stage, it was put to him by Gert Devreese in an interesting interview Fernandez shares that Van Foreest’s eleven-year-old sister Machteld might ‘one day become a better chess player than yourself’. To which Machteld ‘who is sitting next to Jorden at the table, with a slightly threatening voice, [said] ‘Look out, Jorden!’’
To say that the chess world should continue to look out for Jorden and Machteld van Foreest is to state the obvious. Yet we should also keep a close eye on what Fernandez chooses to write next. In a world that tends toward the superficial, he offers real depth and clarity of thought. He can continue to make a meaningful contribution to our understanding of the game in the decades ahead. Tata Steel Chess Tournament 2021 is a worthy contribution and a tribute to his efforts.
London 1922 by Geza Maróczy
(Russell Enterprises)
Foreword by Andy Soltis
Geza Maróczy was one of the strongest players of his generation. Highly regarded by Capablanca, his achievements on the board were matched by his contributions as a theoretician, writer, and chess coach. ‘The Maróczy Bind’, where pawns are placed on e4 and c4 to inhibit Black’s counterplay in some lines of the Sicilian, remains an important chess concept to this day. Maróczy also coached Vera Menchik and played a key role in her development as a player. At one point he was due to take on Emanuel Lasker for the world title, but the match fell through.
His works as a writer include London 1922, which was reissued in 2010, with an excellent foreword from Andy Soltis. Soltis notes that one of the reasons why a tournament would be remembered is ‘…if it was memorialized in a great book. That helps explain why London 1922 achieved its reputation whereas… any number of other great events largely held between the two world wars have been largely tossed into history’s outbox.’ As a bonus, this offering includes all the games from Capablanca’s world title match against Lasker, with Capablanca’s original annotations.
Maróczy would creditably come slap bang in the middle of the field at London 1922, placed eighth out of sixteen. This put him ahead of the then twenty-one-year-old future world champion Max Euwe who was 11th, but behind Bogoljubow (5th) and Reti (6th). Without question, London 1922 was a glittering gathering of the chess stars of their generation – with only Lasker missing.
The appearance of chess’s ‘superstar’ Capablanca, who was playing his first significant chess since defeating Lasker fifteen months previously, certainly contributed to the aura of the event. Soltis highlights that Capablanca’s charisma and prowess were doubtless a major factor in the ‘wholly unprecedented’ turn out from spectators.
Yet it takes two to tango. The appearance of Capablanca’s eventual nemesis Alekhine also added a further dimension to the proceedings. This would be the first event at which Capablanca and Alekhine had played each other in a decade, and for Soltis, ‘…this was where their rivalry truly began.’ Given Capablanca’s superiority, coming in ahead of Alekhine by a full point and a half without a single defeat, few would have imagined in 1922 that a mere five years later Alekhine would wrest the title from the brilliant Cuban.
In a nice anecdote, Soltis highlights that Capablanca who was then six years into what would ultimately prove to be a staggering eight-year run without a competitive defeat, was in deep trouble in his game against Tartakower. On eventually securing a draw, Capablanca remarked to his opponent that Tartakower was ‘…lacking in solidity.’ Tartakower wittily replied, ‘That is my saving grace.’
Soltis notes that the event will also be remembered for the creation of the ‘London rules’ governing how future world title matches might be conducted. He paints an intriguing picture. ‘Capablanca invited the seven other strongest players in the tournament to meet him at cocktail hour at one of London’s priciest hotels. Over champagne and small talk he revealed the reason for this extraordinary get-together…’
Capablanca’s proposals received ‘little dissent’, even if they would not pass modern-day scrutiny, weighted as they were in favour of the reigning champion. (Something Capablanca might well later have rued, when Alekhine refused to grant him a rematch after his shock defeat in 1927.) However, they did represent the very first attempts to codify a set of rules for title matches. From our own vantage point a hundred years later we can reflect that determining world title arrangements has not always proved to be an easy task for later generations either.
Maróczy’s annotations of the tournament games, both his own and those of the other competitors, are clean and crisp. There are many helpful diagrams, and the action is easy to follow. Realistically, this isn’t a book that you buy for the colour or the anecdotes, but squarely for the games and the analysis. It is somewhat of its time, and we are left wondering what Maróczy thought of his fellow competitors as people. However, as an intriguing look at the action in an epic tournament it is a good effort.
Perhaps Maróczy had a certain tendency to play his achievements down, a certain modesty. One of only four players to draw with Capablanca in the tournament, his concluding comment on the encounter reads: ‘The game was perfectly even and a draw was the legitimate result.’ Where a modern writer in similar circumstances might have been more likely to exclaim ‘Get in!’ or ‘How about that?’ before regaling us with tales of his or her subsequent celebrations in the pub.
Final Thoughts
Still, there is a dignity that goes with being understated. Maróczy’s contribution to our game is significant. Perhaps London 1922 would still be remembered without this book. But it retains its prominence and vitality thanks to the power of Maróczy’s pen.