Botvinnik Testimonials, Translated

Last month was the centennial of Mikhail Botvinnik's birth, and there were various celebrations in Russia commemorating the life and contributions of the sixth world chess champion. There were chess tournaments, most notably the big rapid event with Anand, Kramnik, Aronian and Carlsen (to list the players in the order in which they finished - Kramnik and Aronian tied for second), and there was speechifying as well.

At one gathering in particular, such luminaries as Yuri Averbakh, Mark Taimanov and Viktor Korchnoi offered their reminiscences. As one would expect, the talks were in Russian, but English translations are now available - thanks to "Spektrowski". Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.

Botvinnik at 100

A couple of posts ago, I linked to the Wikipedia page for former world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik (1911-1995); I'd also commend this article on the ChessBase news page as well, published a couple of days ago on the 100th anniversary of his birth. Botvinnik was a great player, but his broader contributions to the game make him an even greater figure in our game. He was the first really deep theoretician of the game, and he was also involved in training generations of top Soviet players, including Karpov, Kasparov, Shirov and Kramnik. (How's that for a collection of students?) His discussion of how to prepare for events has also proved influential, and he was even involved in the early days of chess programming, though in this case his successes were pretty limited. In all, though, he was a colossus of 20th century chess, especially in the Soviet Union, where he was known as the Patriarch.

Coming in September: The Botvinnik Memorial

This year is the centennial of Mikhail Botvinnik's birth, and it's appropriate that one of the seminal figures of 20th century chess would be commemorated on such an occasion. In September, in Moscow, there will be a three-day festival that will include rapid and blitz events, and the participation of the big four: Viswanathan Anand, Vladimir Kramnik, Magnus Carlsen and Levon Aronian.

HT: Chess Today

Play Like Botvinnik: Training Course and Annotated Games

Free is good. It's a Chess Assistant product, combining the GM Khalifman and IM Soloviev (more the latter than the former, I'd guess) annotations from the Chess Stars volumes on Mikhail Botvinnik (all the games of his career are given with Informant-style annotations (i.e. all symbols, no text) with about 350 training positions to boot.

A tip on finding things in that interface, which is foreign to committed ChessBasers like myself. "Practice" gives you the exercises, "Theory" gives you the games. But even once you click on Theory you might be confused for a while, as navigating the years and then the tournaments seems to reach a dead end without getting you to the games. So what you do is this: once you've hit some year or tournament in the box, click on one of the Task arrows, and that will load up the first game.

HT: Vladimir.