I think "Kings of Chess: 21 Player Salute" was written by Larry Parr (a respected former editor of Chess Life). My understanding is that it was written by Parr for worldchessnetwork.com - the latter of late another casualty of entropy.

You can find old archived pages which link to the cover page of the article. But since that originally linked to a series of articles the archived versions can't be navigated. Alas.

Did I mention that I think all these history articles should be timestamped - with both the "creation date", and the "last modified date"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_M...

Actually Larry Parr and Lev Alburt claim Botvinnik was known as "Iron Mike," but I kind of doubt it.

<How would you evaluate Tal's play in the match, and his play in general, bearing in mind the difference in playing style between you and Tal?>

<<Some are of the opinion that if you lose to someone, you should criticize your opponent, whereas if you win, you should praise him. I think it is always better to say one and the same thing. I am in a "difficult" position, since after I had lost to Tal I did not say anything. Perhaps now too I shouldn't say anything. Nevertheless, I will risk doing so. The fact that Tal is a player of great talent is known to all. No confirmation from me is needed. If one talks about the deficiencies in his play, I think that they are also known.

Firstly. he is a somewhat one-sided player. When the play is of a more or less open nature and there is mainly a battle between the pieces, then Tal probably has no equals. It is commonly thought that he calculates variations very well. This is indeed so. But on its own this would be insufficient. He knows how to play these positions, and therefore he can economise on his strength in the calculation of variations.

In other positions he "feels" much weaker. More calculation does not help. In such positions one can play quite calmly against him. In the match, therefore, of course, aimed to create such positions, and therefore it was very difficult for Tal to play.

Then, it seems to me, his defiicieny is that he works little. Previously he worked more, prepared better, and developed opening systems. If one looks at his play during the past two years, nothing new is evident, he has not managed to create any new, original variations. He tried playing the variation with e4-e5 in the Caro-Kann Defence. This variation is really not so threatening, and also it is not enough to prepare only one such variation for such a match. This, of course, gave me the opportunity on each occasion to prepare something new for him and all the time to vary. This made my work easier during the games.

At that time Russia, then the Soviet Union was very interested in the propaganda value of Chess, an intelectual game, that you dont need money or complicated equipment to be good at it, the very thing for the common man.

That they put plenty of money in it was more than clear, they had most of the diferent countries FIDE representatives in their payroll, or if they were comunists so much better.

It seems Botwinnik was the very base on which the the whole chess program was based and from this far away one can guess that politically he was also well connected.

It was better to show the world that no only one Russian was good at chess, but in Russia there were many good players.

No doubt they could prevail upon B to allow some candidate get in for a couple of years because it was good for the Soviet Union, but only a couple.

<The return matches are abolished. Do you think it's the right decision?

I wrote about that in an article for Sovetskiy Sport about our chess players' performance in West Germany. I wrote that I considered this FIDE decision to be a mistake and hoped that the return matches would be restored. I also added that I wouldn't take any part in such decisions anymore, but the editor removed that sentence (of course, after getting my approval). However, if our chess players would insist on restoring the return matches, and foreign players agree with them, then FIDE, of course, will restore them. I read Tal's opinion in Shakhmaty v SSSR that return matches should be restored with great interest. I don't know if Tal still agrees with that, but a year ago, he thought that return matches should exist.

The thing is that the young players are interested in the world champion's playing first and foremost. Perhaps this title is not particularly important, because it's clear that there's currently a whole group of international grandmasters who play about equally well, but the fight for the world championship makes these grandmasters improve their chess skills and also increases the popularity of chess. That's why you should create conditions that exclude the possibility of winning this title randomly, or at least do that: if a player starts studying chess less seriously after his win, he should be punished for that. The return match is such a test for him, which is quite useful. Now we have abolished it. There's an unusual situation, because in 1963 I'll already be very old and maybe even won't play a world championship match at all. Also, such a brilliant player as Smyslov is barred from competing for the world championship after his poor performance at the USSR championship. However, if we look at the chess competitions in the last 15-20 years, we'd see that there were perhaps three most consistent and stable players: Keres, Smyslov and me. And it might happen that only Keres would play for the world championship. I think that we should preserve as many players from this three as possible.

How could it happen that such a brilliant player as Smyslov, who was the most feared player in the world between 1953 and 1958, couldn't already compete for the world championship in 1960? We should say that the current rules that determine world championship challengers are more or less fair, but still, any rule has its drawbacks. In particular, in 1949, when the rules were drafted, I proposed the following: "The top half of the Candidates' Tournament automatically qualifies for the next Candidates' Tournament, and the second half automatically qualifies for the next Interzonal." Then, by a series of legitimate reasons, this rule was violated, but I think that it was violated too brazenly. I think that if there was a rule that an ex-champion could always play in the Interzonal, nobody's rights would have been violated. If such rules were in effect now, Smyslov would've played in the Interzonal, and we could be comfortable in thinking that no random things would happen in the next world championship. However, there's a nuance. It's known that only a limited number of participants from one country can play in the Candidates', i think it's 5 out of 8. Two participants from one country are already known, so, only three Soviet players can qualify for the Candidates' Tournament from the Interzonal. There are already four Soviet players in the Interzonal. So, if a fifth player appears, Smyslov, the Soviet players would suffer in some way.

That's a weasel phrase to try to give the impression that someone like Euwe, who won the title and lost it back to the same person were never champions at all. Kavalek used that argument in 1978 to argue that the return match was unfair.

According to Kavalek, if Korchnoi won the first match 6-0, and lost the return match 5-6, he wouldn't win the title despite outscoring Karpov 11-6. Of course that would only be true if Karpov never lost the title when he lost the first match.

Of course, even without a return match, if a person re-qualified he could still win the second match despite losing the first.

<I completely admire Botvinnik; he is no less great a chess player than any Champion.>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYU...

It has English subtitles so all of us can follow along.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTK...