The Middle Years of Paul Keres Grandmaster of Chess

Book excerpt: 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.