The Later Years of Paul Keres Grandmaster of Chess

This is the autobiography of Paul Keres. It is the third and final volume in a series of three books. The other two volumes are The Early Games of Paul Keres Grandmaster of Chess ISBN 4871875407 and The Middle Years of Paul Keres Grandmaster of Chess ISBN 4871875415. The third volume of Keres' selected games contains the games the grandmaster thinks best from the last phase in his career, and is concerned with the decade 1952-62. During this period he met and defeated practically all the great chess-masters of our time, and this selection includes games won against opponents ranging from Botvinnik and Smyslov to Tal and Spassky. Abounding in subtlety and brilliance, the games form a perfect model for the aspiring young player, and those who have read the earlier two volumes will know how exhaustive and informative the notes of the games are. Never before has a writer given such an insight into the workings of the mind of a great chess master as Keres has done here. Harry Golombek, who has translated and edited the book, is Chess Correspondent of The Times and the Observer. He has three times won the British Championship and has figured in the prize list of the Championship on no less than eleven occasions. Paul Keres was born on January 7, 1916 in Narva in what is now Estonia. In this, the third volume, he covers the period from 1952 to 1962, when he kept coming close to earning the right to play a match for the world chess championship, but never quite made it. Keres had a run of four successive second places in Candidates' tournaments: 1953, 1956, 1959, 1962. In this, the first volume, he covers the period from his childhood until his great victory at AVRO 1938. This volume describes Keres' first brilliances and outlines his rapid development to assured and unchallengeable mastery. His victims include Botvinnik, Capablanca and the great Alekhine himself (whom he beat with a characteristically fine Queen sacrifice). Keres is probably the best writer on chess of all the practicing grandmasters. His annotations to these games form a thorough description, at once profound and lucid, of the processes of thought that go to make up a grandmaster. The quality of Keres is such as to make this book and its companion volumes a standard work on strategy and tactics a standard work on chess itself as well as a collection of almost impeccable classic games. Paul Keres was one of the five or six strongest players in the world from 1935 when he emerged as a sensational 19-year-old at the 1935 World Chess Olympics in Warsaw until his untimely death by heart attack at the time of an international airplane flight from Vancouver to Helsinki in 1975. During most of his life, Keres was the number three player in the world. This unfortunate circumstance led to the top two players in the world playing repeated matches for the World Chess Championship, whereas Keres who was usually number three never got a shot at the World Championship. Keres was a native of Estonia. He was always an Estonian patriot, even though he had to keep quiet about it during the years of Soviet rule. His picture appears on both the money and the postage stamps of Estonia. His greatest result ever was his tie for first in the strongest chess tournament ever played, AVRO 1938, a double round-robin tournament to determine who would be the next challenger to World Champion Alexander Alekhine. Keres tied with Fine and finished ahead of future champion Mikhail Botvinnik, current champion Alekhine, former world champions Max Euwe and Capablanca, and Grandmasters Samuel Reshevsky and Salo Flohr. This result earned Keres the right to play a match with Alekhine for the World Chess Championship, a match that Keres would almost certainly have won, but World War II intervened and the match was never played. This, the second volume of the best games of Paul Keres, Presents the mature grandmaster - the man who, during the period covered by this book, was the acknowledged challenger for the World Chess Championship. His style, without losing one iota of its initial freshness and brilliance, had deepened and broadened; and his career in the field of international chess had become one of the most successful of all time. He won first prize after first prize in great tournaments, and included in this volume are some of his resounding victories over the world's leading players - such giants as Botvinnik, Bronstein, Fine, Najdorf, Smyslov, Euwe, Bogoljuboff, Geller and Petrosian. Readers of Grandmaster of Chess: The Early Games of Paul Keres will already be acquainted with the remarkable nature and quality of Keres' annotations: and in this respect the present volume is equally outstanding. Notes and games are, without doubt, of so distinguished a style as to make this work one of the finest individual collections ever to appear in print. Paul Keres was born on January 7, 1916 in Narva in what is now Estonia. In this, the second volume, he covers the period from after his great victory at AVRO 1938, through the war years and the World Championship tournament in 1948 and other events through 1951. This period covers the great controversies in the life of Keres. He went to the 1939 Chess Olympiad in Argentina and while there World War II broke out. Rather than sitting out the war in the comfort of Argentina as did Najdorf and several other grandmasters, Keres returned to Europe. There his native country of Estonia fell under the control of first the Soviets, then the Nazis. Meanwhile, Keres was playing chess, first in Moscow, then in Nazi Germany. Front Translator's Preface Contents 1 Budapest 1952-A great tournament 2 Tournaments and events of the years 1952-1955 3 Fresh attempts at the World Championship, 1955-1956 4 Tournaments and events in the years 1957-1958 5 The Candidates' Tournaments, 1959-1962 List of Events Openings Index List of Opponents Back