Right, it has been a while since I gave you a player profile and I know that those who don’t have as much interest in or understanding of the game itself nevertheless enjoy hearing about the great players in chess history.
Paul Keres was born in Estonia in 1916. Students of European history will know that this was a country that had a number of owners in the first half of the Twentieth Century and the name above the door had a huge impact on his chess career.
Keres was a skilled mathematician and was fascinated by chess, collecting his own dossier of almost 1,000 games from newspapers and reports while learning the game, writing them out by hand.
He was soon established as an excellent player in his area and then his country, taking the Estonian championship in 1935. I have previously mentioned the Chess Olympiad that took place a few months ago. Well, Estonia’s finest was the top board in 1935 and caused a stir for his aggressive play. This was his first appearance on the big stage and he was probably in the top ten players in the world for the next thirty years.
Three years later, he won the AVRO tournament of 1938, which is regarded by some as being the strongest tournament ever played (all things being relative, of course), as Alekhine, Euwe, Capablanca, Botvinnik, Reshevsky and Flohr trailed behind.
In 1939, other matters took over and Keres was in Argentina, winning 12 of his 19 games (drawing 5 and losing only 2) for Estonia in the Olympiad, when war broke out. He managed to get home a little while later, first going through the Netherlands to play a match against Euwe, which he narrowly won - against the odds, it should be said, as Euwe was a more established match player and, we shall not forget, a previous World Champ.
The AVRO tournament victory should have given him a shot at the world title, but of course circumstances were against him and the Alekhine match never happened. That isn’t to say chess stopped; just that it was too difficult to organise.
One consequence of the time was that Estonia became part of the Soviet Union and, so, Keres became part of the great Soviet team; the Harlem Globetrotters of chess. In 1941, Estonia came under Nazi control. By the end of the war, it was Soviet again. I can’t even begin to imagine how hard that would have been for those who lived there at the time, especially someone who would have been hugely popular in a nation of just a couple of million. His interview in 1942 to a Nazi newspaper was used against him, when he tried to escape Western Europe two years later. He was very fortunate to avoid deportation or worse and a Latvian player of the day called Petrovs was put in detention and died in prison.
In 1945, the USSR played the USA in a radio chess match. He would be an obvious choice for the ten man team, but was excluded and it is likely that this wasn’t a complete coincidence.
He did, however, win the Estonian Championship in 1945 without losing any of his 15 games and, in doing so, finished above some excellent “visiting” Soviets.
His dues paid, he was invited to return to the Soviet team in 1946 to play a radio match against Great Britain and you can see the details and some of the games here:
http://amici.iccf.com/issues/Issue_07/issue_07_the_radio_match_grb-urss_1946.htmlI say he paid his dues. It was clear that Keres was one of the very best players in the world, so he had an invite to every big event going. What remains a point of debate is whether he was able to make decisions for himself in those tournaments. Keres was the runner-up in the Candidates tournament (where the winner plays the World Champ) on four consecutive occasions and there are a number of stories involving him (albeit not only him in the Soviet era), where orders from above are rumoured to have been given, such that players such as Keres were to ensure that a certain player won the tournament.
No one will know for sure whether Keres played his very best in every game of every tournament, or whether, had he won a Candidates tournament, he would have won the world title. What is known is that he is regarded by many as being the best player never to have won a world title. He was the three time Soviet champion and has an incredible record in Olympiads (97 wins, 51 draws and 13 losses).
He died in 1975, shortly after arriving in Helsinki from Vancouver (where he had just won a tournament) and he did not make it back to Tallinn.
His funeral in Estonia drew more than 100,000 people.
He was voted the Estonian sportsman of the Century in 2000 (admittedly, I’m struggling to think of the second and third, but this was someone who had been dead for a generation by then, after all).
He was regarded by his peers as one of the nice guys. He had few if any enemies and some have said this was partly why he didn’t dominate the game – Reshevsky suggested he lacked the killer instinct. Over the board, he beat nine World Champions (no one else has done that) and had positive records against Capablanca, Tal and Euwe. Not quite sure myself what more of a killer instinct is needed, to be honest!
Here’s a beauty of a game. He takes down no less than Capablanca with a magical combination:
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1013271 Here, Keres plays a young Bobby Fischer in 1959.