An updated edition of Paul Keres' classic endgame instructor, designed specifically for practical players with over 500 extra diagrams to facilitate learning and memorisation of critical lines of endgame play. It is an essential practical book, for all chess players, from one of the world's greatest grandmasters. Keres remained an elite grandmaster throughout his life and is widely regarded as one of the s strongest ever players not to have won the world chess champion. His book is a comprehensive guide to the precise handling of all basic endgame positions. It features logical step-by-step explanations of procedures required to obtain the best possible results from frequently occurring queen, rook, bishop, knight and pawn endings. It includes commentaries on the final stages of selected tournament games, which demonstrate the art of favourable transposition from complex to clear-cut endgames.
What prevented Paul Keres from becoming World Chess Champion? Readers can judge for themselves from the games in this book, which chart his career as he refined his classical attacking style. John Nunn has selected and annotated the finest of Keres's games from 1962 to his death in 1975.
This is the autobiography of Paul Keres. It is the second volume in a series of three books. The other two volumes are The Early Games of Paul Keres Grandmaster of Chess ISBN 4871875407 and The Later Years of Paul Keres Grandmaster of Chess ISBN 4871875423. This, the second volume of the best games of Paul Keres, Presents the mature grandmaster - the man who, during the period covered by this book, was the acknowledged challenger for the World Chess Championship. His style, without losing one iota of its initial freshness and brilliance, had deepened and broadened; and his career in the field of international chess had become one of the most successful of all time. He won first prize after first prize in great tournaments, and included in this volume are some of his resounding victories over the world's leading players - such giants as Botvinnik, Bronstein, Fine, Najdorf, Smyslov, Euwe, Bogoljuboff, Geller and Petrosian. Readers of Grandmaster of Chess: The Early Games of Paul Keres will already be acquainted with the remarkable nature and quality of Keres' annotations: and in this respect the present volume is equally outstanding. Notes and games are, without doubt, of so distinguished a style as to make this work one of the finest individual collections ever to appear in print. Paul Keres was born on January 7, 1916 in Narva in what is now Estonia. In this, the second volume, he covers the period from after his great victory at AVRO 1938, through the war years and the World Championship tournament in 1948 and other events through 1951. This period covers the great controversies in the life of Keres. He went to the 1939 Chess Olympiad in Argentina and while there World War II broke out. Rather than sitting out the war in the comfort of Argentina as did Najdorf and several other grandmasters, Keres returned to Europe. There his native country of Estonia fell under the control of first the Soviets, then the Nazis. Meanwhile, Keres was playing chess, first in Moscow, then in Nazi Germany.
At the Crossroads of Chess History On March 24, 1946, the fourth world chess champion, Alexander Alekhine, passed away. He was the first – and still the only – champion to die while holding the title. To select a new champion, a powerful quintuple round-robin was held in The Hague and Moscow. The five strongest players of the era, including one former world champion, two future world champions, and two perennial contenders, took part in a grueling two-month, 25-round tournament. “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.” (From the Foreword by Hans Ree) Max Euwe, the fifth world champion, wrote a splendid account of this historic event. It includes a review of all previous encounters between the participants, background information, as well as all the games of the tournament, deeply annotated by Euwe. This fascinating account is finally available in English. You are invited to follow Mikhail Botvinnik, Vassily Smyslov, Sam Reshevsky, Paul Keres and Max Euwe as they battle for the title and the chess world starts its journey through the post-World War II era and the beginning of the Soviet hegemony.
