Strategy I - Mikhail Botvinnik - Hard Cover

patriarch, worker and great champion "Do you think you will be like Capablanca?" Like almost all mothers, Botvinnik's scared a little when he saw that his son, at age 12, had been strongly affected by the chess virus. Professor Parjonnko, director of the school, reassured her: "He should not worry. His son is very studious, and chess benefits. It is better to leave him calm." A couple of years later, that applied and formal child won Capablanca in a simultaneous exhibition (Leningrad, current San Petersburg, 1925). The great Cuban is interested in him, and receives a surprising explanation: "Ah! That is Misha Botvinnik. He plays well, but here we have other boys with much more talent," says Master Ilhin Yenevski to the then world champion. < /span>

that pair of anecdotes indicate that Botvinnik did not dazzle their relatives since childhood, as Morphy, Capablanca, Fischer or Kaspárov did. On the other hand, it seems obvious that being five times world champion requires great innate talent. But, if there was a thermometer to measure genius, it is likely that Botvinnik was less great than other champions. However, it exceeds almost all in its enormous contribution to chess: it produced many works of art; He was the great patriarch of Soviet chess; the pioneer of the rigorous scientific, technical, physical and psychological training that elite chess players must maintain; The first to underline the crucial importance of rest between tournaments, self -criticism and conscientious analysis of their own games and those of the rivals, whom he dissected with the accuracy of an entomologist; and Anatoli Kárpov and Gari Kaspárov teacher, nothing less. And all this even though he dedicated a lot of time during his best years to scientific tasks outside chess, apart from the frustration he felt, after his retirement as a player, because he did not have enough resources to create an inhuman chess player, ten years before the Deep Blue explosion. Mijaíl Moiséievich Botvinnik was undoubtedly one of the great world champions. And we can still learn from him essential concepts, no matter how much the technique and technology applied to chess in the last five decades have progressed.

The aforementioned victory over Capablanca, at age 14, arrived in very hard times. The end of World War I coincided with the outbreak of the 1917 revolution: Soviet children grew with many shortcomings and a minimum diet. The chess flame lit relatively late for what is stylized today in the mind of little mikhail, son of two dentists, but not the light of culture: at 9 years, and under the little light of the summer nights White from St. Petersburg (then Petrograd, and then Leningrad), already read Pushkin, Lermóntov, Gógol and Turgéniev, which damaged his eyes and forced him to use glasses since adolescence.

Nothing indicated then that Imberbe Mijaíl Moiséyevich, waved and loaded with back, was one of the immortals of chess. The typical universal question of what he wanted to be older, he answered "theatrical writer", although he was also interested in music, cats and photography. I read the press daily, and I was already very imbued with government ideology, although it was not admitted as a candidate for a member of the Konsomol (communist youth), up to 15 years.

Although the victory in simultaneous on Capablanca was the great trigger, the change of vocation came two years before, at 12, thanks to a very influential person in the life of Mikhail: Lenia Baskin, Friend of his brother Issy (three years older, dead during the Leningrad site for the Nazis, in 1941). To understand that change, it should first be remembered how Lenia acquired an important moral debt with Mijaíl: he did not give him away when, convinced by him, he stole to his father some pieces of a denture postpon, which caused the only cake that Mijaíl received from his parent, at 9 years. Three later, Lenia decides that discovering the charms of chess is among the best she can do for her faithful friend. "And everything else went to the background from that moment," Botvinnik recalls in his autobiography. Why did mental sport attracted so much? "It is an activity of the intellect, similar to that any ordinary person performs every day to solve their problems. First the scope of the problem is limited, reducing it to its most important elements, and then the most accurate possible solution is sought; that is, The best play. "

Botvinnik's progression since the age of 12 was so fast that it compensated the latest start. He won his first tournament at 13, with a prize of 18 rubles that, apparent , with an anecdote that helps explain its serious and disciplined character. His main adversary for that second triumph was a deaf -mute, folga, who made ostentatious gestures of joy every time Botvinnik was in a lower position. Irritated and fed up with so much mockery, Mikhail decided to take revenge on the last round: see that folga is lost, he goes to his board, and his king tomb. The club president threw a huge anger and threatened to expel him; 60 years later, Botvinnik writes: "I never did something like that in all my career."

Before immersing ourselves in the exciting enjoyment of Botvinnik's youth games, we must give way to another fundamental character in his biography and indispensable to understand the enormous popularity of chess in the USSR: The fearsome Bolshevik commissioner Nikolái Vasílievich Krilenko; Outstanding member of the courts that administered the frightening stalinist purges, his life ended when he was applied his own medicine and executed him in 1938. Now, if we were able to forget that sinister aspect of his life, the chess players around the world would have to Being very grateful: it was he who instigated the report on the pedagogical virtues of chess that Kremlin asked three scientists (Rúdik, Diakov and Petrovski) to then order their mass implementation in all the pioneer palaces (centers of extracurricular activities) of the country biggest in the world. And it was also he who organized the unforgettable Moscow tournament 1925 (Bogoljubov, Capablanca, Lasker, Rubinstein, Carlos Torre, etc.), as a result of which Botvinnik won the world champion in the aforementioned simultaneous. And it was also he who sponsored Botvinnik during his meteoric career until he became a clear candidate for the world title.

both formed a very powerful binomial to achieve permanent support from Kremlin to Chess, which Krilenko was a great passionate: "If the fate of the revolution is to create the newest new man, Worship, intelligent and free that the specimen produced by bourgeois capitalism, chess is the ideal terrain to demonstrate the superiority of the first over the second, of communism over capitalism. " When, 85 years later, we read those words we can better understand the tremendous mazazo that Bobby Fischer gave to the Kremlin when world champion was proclaimed in 1972.

The psychoanalysts would not forgive us if this prologue excluded an event that occurred the day after the victory over Capablanca at age 14: full of joy, the adolescent Mikhail Moiséyevich decided that it was the ideal time for Declare her love for the girl in her eyes, Murka Orlova, sister of her friend Shurka. He cut off his traumatic way: "It is better not to approach because he will not kiss you; you are Jewish." Mijaíl recalled at that time that his father had raised his last name to hide the origin, and that he had also forbidden that at his home he spoke in Yiddish.

Everything explained probably influenced the succession of successes that marry Botvinnik's career until 1941 (a period that covers this first volume that the reader has in his hands), including four first awards in the URSS Championship (1931, 1933, 1939 and 1941). In addition, he won, among others, the following tournaments: Leningrad (1930, 1932, 1933, 1934 and 1938); Moscow 1935; and Nottingham 1936. The third place in the 1938 Avro Tournament must also be highlighted, the strongest in history until that moment, which won Keres, tied to points with Fine, ahead of Botvinnik, Aliojin (poorly transcribed to Spanish as Alekhine) , Euwe, Reshevsky, Capablanca and Flohr.

apart from Krilenko's constant support until his death, it is convenient to underline that Botvinnik was not yet a professional player, if we understand that he dedicated himself exclusively to chess, since he attended the career of an electrical engineer And he dedicated a lot of time to research work in that area, which alternated with his rigorous chess training. In that first phase of its historic career, chess was for Botvinnik, above all, a science, such as engineering. It was later when that young and disciplined young man understood, finally, that elite chess is also a sport of high competition and the maximum demand.

Leontxo García, October 2010