SANDS: Marking the centenary of a cerebral champ
By David R. Sands
The Washington Times
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
He boasted a record and a resume as impressive as anyone who ever played the game, but it always seemed that three-time world champion Mikhail Botvinnik was more admired than loved by chess players around the world.
Botvinnik, born 100 years ago on Aug. 17, 1911, brought an unprecedented level of precision, drive and technical sophistication to the game, helping to formulate and then mastering the insights of the great Soviet school of chess and ranking among the very best players in the world from the mid-1930s into the 1960s.
But his powerful, logical style generated relatively few brilliancies over his lengthy career, and many of the players he held off as world champion, including such greats as Paul Keres, David Bronstein and Mikhail Tal, today claim far more fervent fans than the cool, cerebral Botvinnik. Still, his was a style that generated impressive results, including 15 years as world champ, six Soviet national titles (a record he shares with Tal) and a string of victories in legendary tournaments.
He influenced a new generation of Soviet greats, including junior stars (and future champs) Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov, and top players to this day routinely cite Botvinnik’s “One Hundred Selected Games” collection as a seminal influence on their own early development.
We honor Botvinnik, who died in 1995, with a game taken from the twilight of his career in 1968, two years before he essentially gave up competitive play at age 59.
More here.
He’s the greatest.
I am so glad to see all these articles, statements, and events to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the great Botvinnik.
Botvinnik wrote an autobiography, and Kasparov, Sosonko, Averbakh, Gligorić, and others have also written before about the great patriarch, but for this special occasion it would be highly interesting if somebody who is knowledgeable and with good contacts tried to get in touch with all those living GMs who knew Botvinnik personally, to gather their personal recollections on the old patriarch. All their sincere and honest impressions and opinions on Botvinnik, the good ones and the bad ones (if any.) The compiled material should then be made public.
Invaluable material can be obtained from the 3 big K’s, Shirov, Spassky, all those old lions who were in the recent memorial tournament (Korchnoi, Taimanov, Ivkov, Portisch, Uhlmann, Averbakh, etc.), and perhaps some others (e. g., Gligorić, Gaprindashvili, Ólafsson, etc.) We lost recently Lilienthal and Smyslov, two greats that lived through most of the 20th century chess, and time will come when others will depart, so there is not time to be wasted.
Would someone be interested in doing that? (Susan perhaps?)
Next November 26th 2011 will be the 100th anniversary of Sammy Reshevsky, another towering figure. Are there some memorial activities planned for that occasion?