The Hague-Moscow 1948: Match/Tournament for the World Chess Championship

The Hague-Moscow

1948

Match/Tournament

for the

World Chess Championship

by

Max Euwe

Foreword by Hans Ree

2013

Russell Enterprises, Inc.

Milford, CT USA

The Hague-Moscow 1948

Match/Tournament for the World Chess Championship

by Max Euwe

© English edition copyright 2013 Russell Enterprises, Inc.

& Hanon W. Russell

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any manner or form whatsoever or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-936490-69-1

Published by:

Russell Enterprises, Inc.

PO Box 3131

Milford, CT 06460 USA

http://www.russell-enterprises.com

info@russell-enterprises.com

Cover design by Janel Lowrance

Translated from the Dutch by Piet Verhagen

Editing and proofreading by Taylor Kingston and Peter Kurzdorfer

Table of Contents

Forword

by Hans Ree

The Lead-up to the Great Tournment

by Dr. J. Hannak

The Preparations for the Netherlands Leg

by G.W.J. Zittersteyn

The Official Opening

An Excursion into the Past

by Dr. Max Euwe

The Games from the Past

Botvinnik-Smyslov

Botvinnik-Keres

Botvinnik-Reshevsky

Botvinnik-Euwe

Smyslov-Keres

Smyslov-Reshevsky

Smyslov-Euwe

Keres-Reshevsky

Keres-Euwe

Reshevsky-Euwe

Crosstables

The Hague Leg

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

Round 5

Round 6

Round 7

Round 8

Round 9

Round 10

The Moscow Leg

Round 11

Round 12

Round 13

Round 14

Round 15

Round 16

Round 17

Round 18

Round 19

Round 20

Round 21

Round 22

Round 23

Round 24

Round 25

The Official Closing Ceremony

by G.W.J. Zittersteyn

The Former and the Present World Champion

by Dr. J. Hannak

Indexes

Computer-assisted Supplement

(free PDF download):

http://russell-enterprises.com/excerptsanddownloads.html

Introductory remarks for rounds 1-10 by L.G. Eggink.

Introductory remarks for rounds 11-25 by G.W.J. Zittersteyn.

Foreword

The match-tournament of 1948 in The Hague and Moscow was one of the most important events in the history of chess. It produced a new world champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, and it was also the start of a new era in which the championship would be regulated by FIDE by means of an intricate system of qualification tournaments that would function with only small changes for decades.

When Alexander Alekhine died on March 24, 1946, negotiations for a championship match between him and Botvinnik were well underway. The possibility of this match had already been discussed by the two players in Amsterdam right after the AVRO tournament of 1938.

It had been the intention of the Dutch broadcasting company, AVRO, that their tournament would produce a challenger for Alekhine, and at the time it was indeed considered by many to be a candidates tournament. But not by Alekhine himself, who had never agreed to this. The winner of AVRO was Paul Keres, who shared first place with Reuben Fine, but with a better tie-break score. Botvinnik finished third.

Being passed over by Alekhine in favor of Botvinnik must have been a disappointment for Keres, the first of many in his struggle for the world championship. Anyway, the war that broke out in Europe in 1939 put a temporary end to all speculation about a match for the crown.

In 1946, after Alekhine’s death, FIDE took matters in hand, strongly encouraged by the only surviving world champion, Max Euwe. At a FIDE congress in Winterthur, Switzerland, it was decided who would be the participants in the championship tournament, which at that time was scheduled to take place in 1947. Apart from the five players who would actually play in 1948, there was Reuben Fine, along with one place reserved for one of the winners of the Staunton tournament in Groningen, and the Treybal Memorial in Prague, both to be played later in 1946.

The Prague tournament would be won by Miguel Najdorf, and as Groningen was won by Botvinnik, who already had a ticket to the championship tournament, Najdorf thereby secured a place for himself, or so he must have thought at the time.

Practical difficulties delayed the championship tournament. In 1947, another FIDE congress convened in The Hague. Later, Euwe liked to say that he had been world champion for one day, as during the congress the idea came up to reinstate him as world champion, on the condition that he would play a match against Sammy Reshevsky, and the winner of that match would play Botvinnik for the title. Apparently even during Euwe’s one day of glory, Botvinnik was seen as the man.

But nothing came of that idea. When, the next day, the Soviet delegation arrived, it was to be a match-tournament again. Najdorf was dropped from the list of participants, probably because the Prague tournament was not considered strong enough. Indeed, it wasn’t, but on the other hand, consulting Jeff Sonas’ chessmetrics site, I find that there Najdorf is considered to have been the world’s number two based on retrospective ratings for 33 consecutive months, between July 1946 and June 1949. Najdorf had a point, when, in 1947, in an interview, he declared himself ready to take on all championship contenders.

Early in 1948, Fine withdrew from the tournament for professional reasons. He would later give several different reasons, even writing that the safety of the foreign masters would be questionable in Moscow.

That would have been a good opportunity to give Najdorf back his place, but this didn’t happen. When the tournament started in March 1948 in The Hague, one could say that the Soviet Union, a recent member of FIDE, had negotiated well. Had there been a match between Alekhine and Botvinnik, the outcome would have been in no doubt. Botvinnik would have crushed Alekhine.

But taking the point of view of the Soviet Chess Federation, not much was lost. At the start of the match-tournament, it may have been an exaggeration to say that they had it all in the bag, but they certainly held the trumps.

Three of the five contenders were Soviet citizens, though the Estonian Keres was a reluctant one. Although originally the whole tournament was supposed to have been held in the Netherlands, it had been decided that only the first two legs would be played in The Hague, and the last three in Moscow. And, finally, there was Botvinnik, who, since the so-called Absolute Championship of the Soviet-Union in 1941, had been first in every tournament in which he had played, and was generally recognized as the strongest player in the world.

Nevertheless, at the start of the tournament, the Dutch had great hopes for Euwe. Only two years earlier, he had finished second at the great tournament in Groningen, only a half-point behind Botvinnik. Against Botvinnik, he had a plus score, +2 -0 =4. Euwe was almost 47-years old, but at that time this was not considered such a big handicap as it would be now.

But Euwe started miserably, with four losses, and he never recovered. After more than two months of battle, Botvinnik became world champion, as expected, with the fine score of 14 points out of 20 games. Vassily Smyslov was second with 11 points, Keres and Reshevsky shared third place with 10½, and Euwe was a sad tail-ender with only 4 points.

A curious incident, not mentioned in this book but later described by Euwe, happened at the Polish-Russian border, when the players and their entourage were on their way to Moscow for the second part of the tournament. Soviet custom officials were intrigued by the strange hieroglyphic-looking notes in Euwe’s luggage that in fact constituted his opening repertoire. What should they do?

Making a phone call to Moscow, obviously, where it was decided that Euwe’s notes should be confiscated, checked at leisure in Moscow, and eventually given back. It was a scenario for one of Reuben Fine’s nightmares. Perhaps the safety of the foreign players would be assured, but not that of their notes.

But Botvinnik intervened and phoned Moscow himself. After many hours of waiting it was decided that Euwe could keep his notes, provided that he signed a declaration that nothing in it would be detrimental to the Soviet state. To Botvinnik, Euwe joked that in any event, his analyses were either aimed at Reshevsky, or bad and useless. All is well that ends well.

The Cold War has left no trace in this tournament book. You might say that it had already started right after the end of World War II, but certainly 1948 was a milestone. In February, the month before the tournament started, a coup in Czechoslovakia had brought practically all power to the Communist Party. On March 10, the day when Euwe resigned his adjourned, spectacular fourth-round game against Smyslov, in Prague the dead body of the non-communist Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk was found; he had probably been murdered.

These events must have made a big impression on many people who were involved with the tournament, but the Dutch chess notables who wrote the nontechnical parts of this book, decided – perhaps wisely – not to let the uncomfortable subject of politics interfere with the beautiful story of international friendship and Russian hospitality and love of chess.

There was one participant to whom politics must certainly have been a subject better to avoid: Paul Keres.

The Dutchman Karel van het Reve, who would become one of the country’s most prominent writers, had joined the trip to Moscow as interpreter. His personal aim was to prepare a dissertation in the Lenin Library.

Later, he related that on May 1, the chess group got prominent places to watch the military parade in Red Square, which meant that Keres had an excellent view of the mighty forces that had occupied his native Estonia. When the spectacle was finished Keres just said, So, let’s go play bridge.

Near the end of the book, the Austrian Jacques Hannak touches on politics when he writes about Botvinnik’s world-view, meaning that Botvinnik was a staunch Communist. Though he makes it clear that he doesn’t share this conviction – Hannak was politically active as a social democrat – he respects Botvinnik for the firm moral principles that Alekhine lacked and concludes, After Alekhine, we again have as champion a human being with moral principles. We hail the new world champion Mikhail Botvinnik!!

An issue about which a lot would be written later, but not in this book, is the question whether Keres felt himself forced to do less than his best in his games against Botvinnik. Perhaps it was not yet an issue at that time.

In my opinion, there were signs that something was amiss, especially as may be seen in game 30. There, Keres, normally a fine endgame player, after adjournment, reaches a rook endgame that could be drawn by basically doing nothing, but instead with 50.a4, and the subsequent 53.Rd5 and 54.Ra3, he maneuvers his rook to the most passive position on the board.

In fairness, I must point out that highly qualified observers have considered this atrocity to be just one of those things that can happen to even the greatest players, but I don’t agree. Overlooking a mate in one, yes, but not this.

Though The Hague-Moscow was the low point of Euwe’s chess career, this did not prevent him from producing a fine tournament book. I think an English translation has been long overdue and I am glad that it can now be enjoyed and studied not only by the Dutch, but by a much greater part of the chess public.

Hans Ree

Amsterdam

July 2013

Habemus Papam (We have a Pope)

The Lead-up to the Great Tournament

by Dr. J. Hannak

After a two-year interval, the entire worldwide chess community once again has its world champion. After so many months of uncertainty and tension, of disappointment and hope, the highest position in the chess empire has once again been filled. It was not easy to satisfy both our organizational and esthetic needs. I speak of esthetic needs advisedly, since the absence of a world champion does little to detract from chess from an organizational point of view. But it does strike people of this sports- and statistics-filled century as unpleasant when the inner glory of chess achievement should not be captured in comparably impressive outward form.

Nothing is more significant than the difference between the ideas of today and those of 40 or 50 years ago. In those days, it was precisely the most zealous chess promoters and chess idealists who referred to the world championship with disapproval and contempt. Now, the establishment of the world championship has become such a necessity that, at long last, a serious attempt has been made to subject the championship to firm rules. The organizational regulation and control, not only of the title of world champion, but also of the form and manner in which this title may be achieved and held, seem to us almost more important than the fact that an end has finally been put to a period in which one could speak of a vacant position. What we consider the real progress and the fundamental novelty of this development is not the mere fact that we have a world champion again, but that his position will from now on be defined in part by standards. In the coming years, it will be up to FIDE to demonstrate whether these standards can actually be upheld, or whether the anarchic situation of the past will once more reassert itself. We regard this as an extremely important issue. If the world championship is once more compromised by disregard for the regulations that have been laid down, those people who are still, like the generation of 50 years ago, ill-disposed toward the entire institution and reject it as damaging to chess, will have proven themselves right. With regard to this, the title, more than ever, will entail obligations.

Now we still owe the reader some insight into how the present state of affairs has arisen. The experience with earlier matches for the world championship has not been overly positive. Not only were those matches preceded and followed by disputes of a technical nature, but in addition there were also problems of a financial and personal nature, contradictions, evasions – in short, restraining influences of every kind. Up to the present day, all Steinitz’s successors – with the honorable exception of Dr. Euwe – have been reproached for their reluctance to give the truly strongest players of their time opportunities to pit their strength against them in a match. In Lasker’s case, this reproach is least justified, as this master, after all, did match himself against virtually all the great players of his time: Marshall, Tarrasch, Janowski and Schlechter.

The censure is already more pertinent in Capablanca’s case, and it is fully justified in the case of Alekhine, who refused to grant his predecessor Capablanca a rematch and was not inclined to play matches against Nimzovitch, Réti and Dr. Vidmar. Twice he opted for the aging Bogoljubow, and then, on the third occasion, he chose the young Euwe who, however, threw an enormous spanner in the works.

The arbitrariness surrounding the world championship culminated under the aegis of Alekhine. All of these considerations notwithstanding, it would be unfair to concentrate only on this side of the issue. In a baseball or football championship, despite the enormous financial stakes and risks that so frequently attend them, the existence of the players themselves is much less directly at stake. The massive interest generated by these branches of sport provides a solid material base, not only for the winners but also for the vanquished who, after all, will always be able to make a new bid for victory next time.

The chess master’s case is different: he is alone, he does not have the backing of a powerful financial concern, and the admiration of the chess community, spread out over the entire world, cannot provide him with a living. Football players play their sport for some ten years, after which they choose another occupation. But a chess master is a chessplayer for life, and it is a bitter livelihood as long as the profession of chess master remains completely unprotected socially and economically. As long as there is no massive and dependable audience with spending power to promise the chess master a modest existence, as long as there is such a surge towards this uncertain profession that the personal competition between players is only intensified, and as long as the chess master is virtually left to fend for himself within the free economy, he has no other choice than to fight tooth-and-nail to defend his position, achieved by a match victory and the winning of his title.

In fact, the shame and indignity of having to depend on all kinds of patrons and operators of gaming houses, casinos, etc., has already partly broken the only men who guarantee the continued existence of mankind’s noblest mental recreation, and one would have to be a personality of the spiritual stature of a Lasker to preserve one’s greatness of character in these circumstances. Which brings us to the thorny problem of Alekhine.

There can be very little doubt that, as far as the pure art of chess is concerned, Alekhine must have been the greatest genius in the history of chess until today. If anything of chess is destined to remain immortal, it will be his games and analyses. In another one hundred or one thousand years, people will hardly be interested in how the man Alekhine behaved in other areas. Meanwhile, we his con- temporaries who have, sometimes with an oppressive heaviness of heart, been forced to witness the dark side of his nature, endeavor not to justify but certainly to explain his shortcomings.

A ruler from the aristocratic class, accustomed to commanding and despising his slaves from an early age, a Czarist officer full of indomitable passion and self-indulgence, reduced to a nobody by a great revolution, sent to prison, exiled. And in this desperate uncertainty, he sublimated all these imperious characteristics in a game. Everything which he was incapable of realizing in his public life – lording over the lives and deaths of his subjects – he now becomes on the sixty-four squares of the chessboard. All the spiritual desire and sensual creative urges of his nature, his will, the indomitable will to power, are now restricted to the wood of the black and white pieces. In them, his genius manifests itself; through them, his vices force themselves upon the world.

His tortured nerves lead him into narcotics and make him surrender himself to wine and liquor. He longs for the life of a gentleman and as a consequence pursues pecuniary interests. He marries a few times without his soul being involved, seeking only riches and power. Whoever resists him is his enemy, and whoever covets his world title and wants to take it away from him becomes the object of his hatred. Outside of chess he, with all his demonic characteristics, is congenial and fascinating by his total surrender to everything that interests his mind. Conversations with him belong to one’s most cherished memories, yet one cannot divest oneself of the feeling: opposite is a noble predator that may at any time strike with his mighty claw.

His absolute self-obsession, which a normal human being is simply unable to comprehend, at the same time renders the egocentric Alekhine unable to care about the needs, happiness, joy or sorrow of others. His attitude toward the world around him is so naive that he is incapable of understanding whether he has done evil or good. He merely acts in response to the instincts of his predatory nature, and in certain respects one cannot possibly hold him responsible for the outrageous things that he has done.

For these reasons he is also extremely naive in political issues, and completely subject to the dictates of the moment. Uncertain, he gropes between the fear of a regime that has driven him into foreign exile and his yearning to be finally invited to a tournament in Moscow. Today he says this, tomorrow that, but always with the same fervor. The last time I saw him, in Lisbon in March 1941, the first thing he called out to me was: Well, what do you say about your good friend Euwe? He cooperates with the Germans, but I just fled France to escape from the Germans, although I still have a castle and dollars there. I am prepared to play the Russian grandmaster Botvinnik or the Jew Reshevsky for the world title. I already have a visa for Cuba in my pocket, and from there I will go to New York. We will soon meet there.

When he declared this, he was fully convinced of the truth of his words. But a few days later the Nazis attacked Yugoslavia and Greece, and now Asia Minor and Suez were also under threat. This caused Alekhine to go to the other extreme. I had hardly arrived in New York when I was given the sensational news in both the Marshall and the Manhattan clubs that Alekhine had returned to France and had started publishing a series of abusive articles which progressed from attacks on Jewry in chess to bemoaning the Bolshevization of chess. Alekhine was now backing the other horse, betting on victory for the Germans. These essays were Alekhine’s moral downfall. Although everyone who knew him was aware that Alekhine, for all his shortcomings, had never evinced any sign of anti-Semitism and had certainly not expressed his own true opinion, it was generally agreed that such a person could no longer be recognized as world champion. For the chess world, too, there exists something higher than the most beautiful immortal game; for the chess movement, too, there is such a thing as honor.

This is where the first seeds for a championship tournament to fill the vacancy of the world title were sown. Reuben Fine was the first person to express this thought, first among his friends and then in a long article in the New Yorker Chess Review.

He was full of optimism at the time, and convinced that he would be able to find a few hundred people in America prepared to donate one hundred dollars each to make it possible to organize a tournament. He telegraphed Botvinnik and contacted the Russian authorities. Fine was also the first person, as far as we know, who energetically took the initiative in this matter. It strikes one, therefore, as somewhat tragic that, just when the goal he had been working towards for so many years had been reached, he withdrew from the tournament just a few days before the start. No doubt there are deeper causes behind this withdrawal; it is the conscious or unconscious expression of the disappointment Fine had felt during his many years of trying to bring his plan to fruition. For he was not long in finding out that things were not as simple as he had imagined. The first question to be answered was what attitude to take toward Alekhine, but it turned out to be impossible to come to an agreement on this. Fine, utterly loyal, was happy