4/6/2023 0 Comments Best chess move![]() ![]() We can't say for sure what's on their minds - maybe they're wondering if they left the gas on or, to update the cliché: maybe they left their phone at home. Actually, "bending the facts" might be an understatement.If you've ever had occasion to watch chess players, you might have wondered why they spend so long staring at the chessboard and its arrangement of pieces. Remember I mentioned that sometimes Kotov preferred to bend the facts to make his point? This is exactly the case. Only many years later I learned what really happened in the actual game. ![]() Yes, the position after 28.h4 didn't look too good for White, but it was definitively not the one where you would resign! Still, as an 11-year-old kid I couldn't understand why White decided to resign after he played 26.Bc3. I was very fascinated when I read this compelling story the first time. Let's talk about "Kotov Syndrome" since it is the very first topic covered by the above-mentioned book. Wikipedia even mentions the so-called " Kotov Syndrome" as "a situation where a player thinks very hard for a long time in a complicated position but does not find a clear path, then, running low on time, quickly makes a poor move, often a blunder". Many chess terms that we use today on a regular basis, like "candidate moves" or "the tree of variations" stem from this book. In this groundbreaking work, Kotov discussed the way chess players search for the best move and how they make their decisions. In my personal opinion, the most important book of his is The Mysteries Of Chess Player's Thinking published in 1970 and one year later translated into English as Think Like A Grandmaster. Photo: Ben Merk/Dutch National Archives, CC. Kotov playing in the 1967 IBM tournament. Nevertheless, we should see the forest for the trees: most of Alexander Kotov's books were very instructive and extremely useful for aspiring chess players. In order to prove that Alekhine wasn't a nazi and didn't write his notorious articles for Pariser Zeitung, Kotov had to bend some facts. Another reason is that the books he wrote about Alekhine were part of the huge Soviet propaganda machine. It might have happened due to the persistent rumors about his collaboration with KGB. Well, first of all, he was a household name some 40-50 years ago, but slowly his fame faded away. ![]() You are probably wondering why such an extraordinary person as Kotov is not a household name. There I found a bunch of books written by Soviet grandmasters but printed in East Germany. Since I don't speak German, it was challenging at first, but pretty soon I learned the German chess notation as well as some basic phrases like "Schwarz gewinnt." It is funny, but when I just started playing chess, I had more books in German than in Russian! These shops were selling books printed in the countries of the Eastern Bloc. There was a chain of bookstores called "Friendship" all around the Soviet Union. Personally, I used a little trick to read Kotov's books. Photo: Jack de Nijs/Dutch National Archive, CC. As I mentioned in this article, you would have to pay a hefty premium to get a good chess book in the Soviet Union. For instance, his two-volume book on Alekhine was sold out almost instantly despite 100,000 copies published. Even the people who didn't play chess at all enjoyed Kotov's book White And Black as well as the movie The White Snow Of Russia, which is based on the book.Īs a prolific writer, Kotov wrote many books that became bestsellers. The kids of my generation who studied chess seriously would never miss the weekly TV chess school hosted by Kotov. Thanks to Alexander Kotov, millions of people got interested in chess. While there were many players in the history of our game who had similar or even better chess results, it is difficult to find anyone who could compete with Kotov's impact on chess popularity. You'll see dozens of truly great games of this talented player. Do yourself a favor and get a book of selected games of Kotov. ![]()
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