{"id":2145,"date":"2023-03-24T13:44:43","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T13:44:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forwardchess.com\/blog\/?p=2145"},"modified":"2023-03-24T13:44:45","modified_gmt":"2023-03-24T13:44:45","slug":"celebrating-chess-champions-vasily-smyslov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forwardchess.com\/blog\/celebrating-chess-champions-vasily-smyslov\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating Chess Champions: Vasily Smyslov"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Andrey Terekhov<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vasily Smyslov, the 7th<\/sup> World Chess Champion, was born on this day, 102 years ago. He played in four chess World Championships from 1948 to 1958 and became the 7th World Champion by defeating Mikhail Botvinnik in 1957. He would lose the title in the return match in 1958, but a quarter of the century later, he made a stunning comeback, making it all the way to the Candidates Final match. Only the unlimited energy of the young Garry Kasparov could stop Smyslov from qualifying for another world championship match at the ripe-old age of 63.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Interpolis Chess Tournament Tilburg 1977. <\/sup><\/sub>
(Photo: Suyk, Koen, ANEFO, Dutch National Archives<\/a><\/em><\/sup><\/sub>.)<\/sup><\/sub><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Yet, of all the world champions that the chess world has had to this date, Smyslov remains one of the least known. His style was not as flashy as Alekhine or Tal, and the more recent champions, such as Karpov or Carlsen, are better known today when it comes to strategic play.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was first introduced to Smyslov’s games when I was a small kid. My coach at the time was big on chess fundamentals and thus I saw a lot of games by Capablanca, Botvinnik, Karpov \u2013 and yes, Smyslov. His play was magnificent and had that Mozart-like lightness about it, which is why Vladimir Kramnik once described Smyslov as “the truth in chess”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years after Smyslov passed away I bought a collection of his best games. It was Smyslov\u2019s \u201cmagnum opus\u201d, a book that contained 326 of his games played from 1935 and almost all the way to the end of his career as a player (well, not quite, as the book was published in 1995, while Smyslov continued to play until his eyesight failed, and that was already in the 21st<\/sup> century!) All games were annotated by Smyslov himself and replaying them felt like a reunion with a long-lost friend. I was once again in awe of the beauty of the games and the clarity of the annotations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started looking for other books on Smyslov… but could not find anything! There were literally no biographies of Smyslov \u2013 only the books that the 7th<\/sup> World Champion wrote himself. I kept on waiting, hoping that one day a renowned grandmaster or a famous chess historian would cover this gap in the chess literature, but then I realized that this day may never come, and so I decided to write it myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast-forwarding a few years, I spent analyzing Smyslov\u2019s games, studying in the libraries, and reading old newspapers, chess journals, and tournament bulletins. Finally, I was able to get in touch with Smyslov\u2019s heirs and spent a week sorting out his personal archives in the house where the world champion spent the last years of his life.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of 2020, this work culminated in the publication of the first volume of what is hopefully going to be a long series on Smyslov, \u201cThe Life and Games of Vasily Smyslov. The Early Years: 1921-1948<\/a>\u201d<\/strong>, which is available on ForwardChess. This book describes Smyslov\u2019s ascent from an unknown and unranked chess amateur to the youngest participant in the World Championship match tournament that was organized in 1948 after the death of Alexander Alekhine.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The world that we live in today is vastly different from the one that Smyslov grew up in the late 1930s. Suffice it to say that Smyslov played his first tournament game only a few months after turning 14; today there are over dozen players who managed to achieve a grandmaster title by that age! (curiously enough, Smyslov even played a match against one of these prodigies, losing 1:5 to 13-years-old Etienne Bacrot in 1996)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, in his time Smyslov was a prodigy in his own right, and in this book, I am tracing his meteoric rise in the late 1930s-early 1940s. After a relatively late start to his \u201cofficial\u201d chess career, he progressed at a breakneck pace, winning almost every tournament that he played in (some of them with 100% scores!), becoming a junior champion of the Soviet Union in 1938, then scoring a newly introduced Candidate Master title by winning an all-Soviet adult competition of First Category players in August 1938, before finally scoring a Master title by winning the Moscow championship in October. At the age of 17, Smyslov became the youngest master in the Soviet Union (which should probably tell you how difficult that title was to achieve).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Smyslov at the USSR Junior championship in January 1938<\/sup><\/sub><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

This string of successes was followed by a breakthrough performance in Smyslov\u2019s first Soviet Union championship in 1940, where he finished with a bronze medal \u2013 but ahead of Keres, Botvinnik, and Boleslavsky! (Bondarevsky and Lilienthal were the surprise winners)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1941, after another bronze in the Absolute championship of the Soviet Union (this time behind Botvinnik and Keres) Smyslov became the youngest grandmaster in the Soviet Union and, arguably, in the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, there were times when a 20-year-old grandmaster was considered very young. For the next half a century teenage grandmasters would continue to be an exception, rather than a rule (the next youngest grandmaster would be Spassky, who became a GM at 18, then Fischer would famously push the record to 15\u00bd).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s take a look at a game that was typical for the energetic style of the young Smyslov:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

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