The Games of Tigran Petrosian, Vol. 1: 1942-1965

The Games of Tigran Petrosian #1

by Eduard I. Shekhtman (Editor), Tigran Petrosian (contributor)

(Pergamon Russian Chess Series)
English (translation) Original Russian

Genres: Chess

480 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1991

Reviews

[TrumanCoyote · Rating 5 out of 5]

The weak part of this book is the notes. Petrosian is very far from being the world's greatest annotator: too by-the-book and Sovietish (a real Kotov clone). The other contributors aren't always too enlightening either (and are seldom if ever attributed in the text--which is another liability). Still, the games themselves more than make up for all of this. I started out just thinking that I would play over the first few and lose interest...but I ended up going through the whole book. One interesting thing is that Tigran is not a whirlwind genius from the get-go; the earliest games are sometimes a bit bumbling, and so you really get this sense of a young player having to learn his chops rather than being blessed with some Capablancan vision from the outset. What's most remarkable about him is his rapid progress once he became a master: he went from a borderline titleholder to one of the world's best in a few years (somewhat akin to Reuben Fine's astonishing progress from 2100 player to winner of AVRO 1938 in a similarly restricted length of time). The most surprising thing for me about this collection is the large number of marvelous attacking games he played--very beautiful attacks. Of course, you expect a slew of positional buildups from Petrosian (with every brick in place)--but who knew that he would resemble Bronstein (or even Tal) on many more than one occasion? Fischer's remark (quoted in the text early on) rings true: "If only Petrosian would play more boldly, he would be world champion."