David Bronstein ZURICH INTERNATIONAL CHESS Se eel asceen ecru sc ola il = aZURICH INTERNATIONAL CHESS TOURNAMENT, 1953 by DAVID BRONSTEIN Translated from the Second Russian Edition by JIM MARFIA Dover Publications, Inc. New YorkCopyright © 1979 by Jim Marfia. All rights reserved under Pan American and International Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by General Publishing Company, Ltd., 30 Lesmill Road, Don Mills, Toronto, Ontario. Published in the United Kingdom by Constable and Com- pany, Ltd., 10 Orange Street, London WC2H 7EG. Zurich International Chess Tournament, 1953 is a new English translation by Jim Marfia of the second, corrected Rus- sian edition as published by Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo “Fizkul'tura i Sport” [State Publishing House “Physical Culture and Sports”], Moscow, in 1960 under the title Mez- dunarodnyi turnir grossmeisterov; kommentarii k partiyam tur- nira pretendentov na maté s empionom mira. International Standard Book Number: 0-486-23800-8 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-74881 Manufactured in the United States of America Dover Publications, Inc. 180 Varick Street New York, N.Y. 10014A WORD FROM THE TRANSLATOR Surely, this is no ordinary chess book that you hold, dear Reader. Myself, I have read chess books that were entertaining, and those that were instructive; some that were historic, and a few that were downright bad. But never have I encountered a book written with such powerful style and such obvious passion for the game. The passion is infectious. The translation you hold is the final pro- duct of ten years' work and four revisions — and still, I feel that it wanted more effort...so you can see the fascination Bronstein's book had for its translator! If my translation can infect you, the Reader, with half of that fascination, then it will be a job well done. I must thank Jack O'Keefe for his meticulous proofreading and price- less editorial work. Jim Marfia [iii]INSTEAD OF A PREFACE As I began work on my first chess book, I put myself mentally in the reader's place, recalling the excitement with which I used to openeach new chess book, hoping to find vital thinking there, clear words, and a wondrous tale of the art of chess. I absorbed a great deal from books, and to this day I cherish the memory of the best of them. Books about chess tournaments belong to a special class of litera- ture, which would seem at first blush to be rather restrictive of the author's creative possibilities, since he must write, not on themes of his own choosing, but about chess material already created. But this is not quite true. The author is free to treat the games any way he wishes, to make generalizations, and to uncover the ideas and plans actually ex- ecuted, as well as those that could have occurred in the actual or some other game. The book of a strong tournament is more than just a games collection. When its participants are the world's strongest players, then the games are mutually interdependent, and brimming with ideas, which crystallize and develop as the event progresses. Thus, the tournament as a whole represents a step forward in the development of chess creativity. We may take as examples of such tournaments the events at Hastings 1895, St Petersburg 1914, New York 1924, Moscow 1935, and Groningen 1946. Be- yond doubt, Zurich-Neuhausen 1953 deserves a place among them. In working on this book, I started from the premise that every full~ bodied game of chess is an artistic endeavor, arising out of a struggle between two masters of equal rank. The kernel of a game of chess is the creative clash of plans, the battle of chess ideas, which takes on its highest form in the middlegame. This book examines a number of standard positions which occur as a result of the collision of plans; also examined are such strategic con- cepts as darksquare weaknesses, the advantage of the two bishops, play and counterplay on opposite wings, the relative strengths of the pieces, overprotection, and so forth. Such elements of the struggle as intui- tion, resourcefulness, and determination are discussed too. The games of a tournament of grandmasters bring the reader into the creative circle of the contemporary leaders of chess, showing him the tise and fall of battle as well as the manner in which a game of chess is created. It is the author's intention to discourse upon the least ex- plored and most interesting stage of the game: the middlegame, and the way it is handled by today’s grandmasters. That is the basic aim of this book. The author has tried to avoid weighing down his book with variations. Variations can be interesting, if they show the beauty of chess; they become useless when they exceed the limits of what a man can calculate; and they are a real evil when they are substituted for the study and clarification of positions in which the outcome is decided by intuition, fantasy and talent. Along with this, it was my hope that the player who read this book would taise himself thereby to a rather higher level of playing strength. The reader will see errors, too, in the games of this tournament; but he will not be too severe in his judgment of the masters if he pictures to himself the peculiar nature of the chess struggle. At the board there sits a living person, with all his everyday thoughts and worries, some- times far removed from chess. While selecting his plan, or even his next move, he cannot help thinking about his standing in the tournament, re- membering yesterday's result, looking at other games. A game is not an analysis: everything must be worked out in one's head, without moving the pieces, without consulting a book or asking advice from anyone... Wv]The grandmaster thinks and thinks — one last look at the clock — "Time to decide; I'll risk it!" — and the knight goes to e5. Of course it's easy, a whole year later, after studying all of the analyses and spendi days on the position, to tell the reader, with absolute cer- tainty:"A mistake; the careful Nel was to be preferred..." It may be that mistakes will turn up in my analyses and evaluations as well, although I have tried to keep them to a minimum. It is my hope that the reader will be indulgent, and help me to correct them. It is with trepidation, then, that I submit my work to the judgment of the readers. 1 will consider my ends achieved if the contents of this book expand the reader's chess horizon, increase his mastery of the game, give him some idea of the state of the art, and help him more fully to value — and still more to love — the depths of chess. vi]PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Now that my book is ready for its second edition, I would like to explain today what I had to pass over in the preface to the first edi- tion four years ago. The work I submitted to the readers’ judgment at that time was a work which had little in common with the commentaries usu~ ally seen in the chess press. "Rotework" isa thing abhorrent to art and lit- erature alike; thus, it should be still less acceptable in chess, which ac- tually falls somewhere in an intermediate zone between art and litera- ture. I do not wish to say anything against the numerous tournament and reference books that are being published, but for some years now a con- siderable decline has been noticed in the appetite of chessplayers for this type of literature, and yesterday's insatiable demand has slack- ened. Under these circumstances, how would the public accept a large and unfortunately rather expensive tournament book, such as this one? I had no wish to become a variations-monger; nor did I want the role of annotator-cum-guide. I felt that the author's ideas and conclusions should form the basis of this book, with the moves played in each game serving to annotate them, as it were. I tried to let the book's contents display the richness and limitless expanse of chess ideas, and to let the format resemble that of a literary work. To judge from all the accepted indicators, the author appears to have accomplished his purpose, at least in part: the book sold out very quickly, and the reviews were favorable. Most valuable to me, however, were the many letters and opinions I received from readers (and I re- gret not having answered nearly enough of them). There I found, along with justified criticism of my book's shortcomings, approval of the basic principles by which it was written. Those letters have been the finest possible reward for my labors, and I should like to take this opportunity to offer my heartfelt thanks to all who wrote me. I should like especially to thank Peter Romanovsky for his detailed review (helpful to readers and the author alike) which appeared in "Shakhmaty v SSSR". I was happy to agree to the publishers' suggestion of a second edi- tion; I intended to excise all obsolete and unimportant materials, to develop other material a bit more fully, and to expand the preface to reflect the most recent developments in the world of chess. Thus, this second edition devotes a great deal less space to text, in games which did not serve my purpose of uncovering and describing the ideas of the art of chess. This applies especially to games from the later rounds, when the final standings of the tournament had already been largely determined, and the tension had slackened somewhat. Addi- tionally, two or three errors in analysis, discovered by the readers and the author, have been corrected; the proofreading has been up- graded, and some diagrams revised. I would like to close this segment with the hope that in the future my chessplaying audience will continue to aid the author in his work with their alert criticism, as well as their words of praise. toktiek Since this is a book devoted mainly to the middle phase of the game of chess, it might be appropriate to begin with a few words about the evolution of opening ideas and the modern openings repertoire. In former times — shall we say, the latter half of the preceding century — a game generally opened with the king's pawn, to which Black would, in the majority of cases, reply 1..e7-e5. Such defenses as the Sicilian and the French were also employed, of course, but less frequently. With some exceptions, over half of the games played in any tournament would be open games, and sometimes a much greater percentage than that, At the close of the last century and the beginning of the (vii]