Averbakh on the World Championship

In yesterday's post on my main blog, Friendly Chess Players, I introduced Averbakh's 'Centre-Stage and Behind the Scenes: A Personal Memoir'. The book is filled with stories about the World Championship, some of them new to me, many of them in more detail than I've seen before. Here's a list, each entry starting with its first page number in the book.

059 : 1950 CT
063 : 1951 19th USSR Chp semifinal (pre-zonal)
064 : ---- Pen portraits (A)
070 : 1951 19th USSR Chp (zonal)
071 : 1952 IZ
078 : 1953 CT
092 : 1955 22nd USSR Chp (zonal)
100 : ---- Sparring partner to MB
108 : 1958 25th USSR Chp (zonal)
110 : 1958 IZ
112 : ---- Early rules for WCC
120 : 1959 CT
129 : 1962 CT
147 : 1968 IZ playoff
154 : 1971 CM: TP-VK, RF-TP
157 : ---- Baturinsky
163 : 1972 WC: RF-BS
164 : 1963 VS & zonal
166 : 1974 CM: TP-LP, VK-TP
169 : 1977 CM: VK-TP
171 : 1974 FIDE Congress: AK-RF
175 : 1974 CM: AK-VK
178 : 1976 VK defection
185 : 1978 WC: AK-VK, Sevastianov
190 : 1982 IZ
193 : 1972 WC: RF-BS, Euwe
194 : 1982 FIDE President Campomanes
199 : 1982 CM: VS-RH, VS-ZR, GK-VK
214 : 1984 WC: AK-GK I
220 : 1985 WC: GK-AK II
221 : 1986 WC: GK-AK III
223 : 1987 FIDE Presidential election, GMA
223 : 1987 WC: GK-AK IV
224 : 1988 USSR Chp, GK-AK playoff
227 : 1988 USSR vs. World charity match
229 : 1990 Women's CT, Krogius
232 : 1972 Graz, Huebner - Rogoff (B)
233 : 1990 FIDE Presidential election
235 : 1987 GMA
236 : ---- Chess psychology (C)
240 : 1982 OL: Manila
242 : 1993 Schism, PCA, GK-NS, AK-JT
247 : 1994 OL: Salonika -> Moscow
250 : 1994 FIDE Presidential election
251 : 1995 FIDE Congress, Paris, Ilyumzhinov

IZ: Interzonal
CT: Candidate Tournament
CM: Candidate Match
WC: World Championship
OL: Olympiad (esp. Congress++)

AK: Karpov, BS: Spassky, GK: Kasparov, JT: Timman, LP: Portisch, MB: Botvinnik, NS: Short, RF: Fischer, RH: Huebner, TP: Petrosian, VK: Korchnoi, VS: Smyslov, ZR: Ribli

(A) Zubarev, Blumenfeld, Duz-Khotimirsky, Rabinovich, Verlinsky, Romanovsky
(B) A little known story about the future IMF Chief Economist; nothing to do with WC
(C) Incl. six categories of player as in 'Friendly Chess Players'

Although Averbakh's book deserves a review on my blog, this summary will have to do for now.

Fortunate with His Temperament

Fischer (1943-2008), Filip (1928-2009), Smyslov (1921–2010), Larsen (1935–2010), now Gligoric (1923–2012); one by one the World Championship contenders of the mid-20th century are leaving us: Svetozar Gligoric, legend of the King's Indian, dies at 89, (Chessvibes.com, 14 August 2012).

The first chapter of Gligoric's I Play against Pieces (Batsford 2002) is autobiographical, with several passages relating to his struggles for the World Championship. A sample:-

An episode from my 'comeback' in 1967: After the Interzonal in Portoroz 1958 I gave the impression of being one of favourites in the Candidates tournament 1959 of 8 participants, and I disappointed my audience when I finished 5th-6th in the company of a young grandmaster by name of Bobby Fischer... I continued my 'going down' in the Interzonals at Stockholm 1962 and Amsterdam 1964, failing twice to qualify for the Candidates stage. When I went to Sousse in 1967, nothing spectacular was to be expected from me.

At that time, I had some new ideas for a safe opening repertoire and intended, as usual, to rely on my intuition during play. My plan was not to lose a single game and to gain the minimum number of wins necessary for qualification -- and that I thought I could do.

I was 44 and it surprised me when my new second, young Velimirovic, treated me like a novice in international chess. He forced me to break my regular habits and to spend 2-3 hours each morning in preparation for the game in the afternoon. It was like a prophecy of how chess players behave nowadays, where preparation can offer a 90% guarantee of success.

Gligoric finished tied for 2nd-4th (+7-0=14) with Korchnoi and Geller (1967 Sousse Interzonal Tournament). The following year he played Tal in the first round of the Candidate matches.

My tactics were like balancing on the brink of a threatening abyss -- if I lost a single game. It did happen in my next match with Tal who, in 1968 said that for several reasons Belgrade as a playing site was a handicap to me. I was leading after five games and both Tal and his second Koblentz believed that I was going to win the match.

Then in the 6th game, stupidly irritated by journalistic comments on the 'monotony of our duel', I shocked myself with a sudden decision at the board to make a 3rd move as White for which I was unprepared. After that defeat I collapsed. If one could explain it -- I must have been tired of the situation with no tranquillity. Among other things, the playing hall was across the street from where I lived downtown with my wife and this was like an open invitation to benevolent visitors to frequent our place. However I was fortunate with my temperament and did not regret one bit my lost chance.

Not only was Gligoric a world class player, he was also a world class journalist and a world class arbiter. The man who declared himself to be 'fortunate with my temperament' is already in the books as one of the greatest.

Botvinnik Rules

Throughout 'My Great Predecessors II', Kasparov was critical of limitations placed on Soviet players in the qualifying cycles of the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote the following in the chapter on Botvinnnik (p.186; I've left out details about individual circumstances).

[In 1958] there began a spell of bad luck and vexing failures in Bronstein's career. The cause of this was largely the Botvinnik initiated limit on the representatives from one country (i.e. the USSR) in the Candidates tournaments: not more than five out of eight were allowed.

In the Interzonal tournament in Portoroz 1958 there were six qualifiers, but the four Soviet grandmasters were fighting for only three places (since Smyslov and Keres were already in the list of Candidates), and willingly or not they were forced to play keeping an eye on one another. Both [Bronstein] and Averbakh missed out by half a step.

He was to suffer an even crueller stroke of fate at the Interzonal in Amsterdam 1964, where five Soviet grandmasters were fighting for the same three places. Another to suffer was Stein, who fell victim to the 'Botvinnik rule' for the second consecutive time.

It was effectively on account of this unjust restriction that two such splendid players as Bronstein and Stein missed out on the battle for the World Championship. Their replacements in the Candidates events were not of equivalent strength and it is clear that, with their participation, things at the top of chess could have turned out differently.

Alas, few now remember these human dramas. But meanwhile they reflected the unnatural situation that existed in chess in the 1950s and 1960s, when many of the best grandmasters, occupying most of the places in the world's top 30, had no opportunity to participate fully in the World Championship qualifying cycle -- for the only reason that they were Soviets.

Some will retort: but with this limit, fighting spirit was strengthened and only the very best made it to the top -- that is by the laws of Darwinism, the strongest survived. But just think how much nervous energy it cost these world-class stars to battle among themselves for the right to squeeze through the eye of a needle. And how it must have been to recognize that you are stronger and have occupied a higher place, but it is another player who will go through. Were not these unhealed spiritual wounds one of the causes of the untimely death of Leonid Stein?

(That last sentence deserves special attention, but it takes me too far from the subject at hand; this is not the right place to address it.) In the same chapter (p.215) Kasparov linked the 'Botvinnik rule' with the right to a return match.

In 1956, soon after Smyslov's second victory in the Candidates tournament, an event occurred that was to have a strong influence on the entire modern history of chess: FIDE granted the World Champion the right to a return match. The decision was adopted together with the aforementioned 'Botvinnik rule', and also not without the participation of [Botvinnik] (I should remind you that his friend Ragozin was a FIDE Vice-President).

Although earlier, in the late 1940s, in his plan for the contesting of the World Championship, he had rejected the idea of the return match, since 'it's organization would disturb the periodicity of the system, and in the interests of chess this must not be allowed', and he had gained the right for a defeated champion to play a match-tournament with the champion and the challenger three years later (this FIDE rule operated in the 1951 and 1954 matches).

The inescapable conclusion is that Botvinnik was behind both the limitation on Soviet players and the return match because these rules gave him better chances to retain his World Championship title. While I have no particular argument with this conclusion, I still wonder to what extent the 'Botvinnik rule' was a consequence of other federations' fears of Soviet collusion, as described in Collusion and Consequences. Perhaps it wasn't really a 'Botvinnik rule', but rather Botvinnik seeing personal advantage in a rule favored by the other chess federations.

In 'Predecessors IV' Kasparov dismissed the idea that Soviet collusion was responsible for Fischer's mediocre showing at Curacao in 1962. 'At that moment Bobby was not yet ready to win such a tournament -- irrespective of whether or not there was such a pact. Averbakh: "If Fischer could have beaten the Soviet grandmasters, as was to happen later in the early 1970s, no amount of draws would have been able to stop him."' (p.300). In other words, to win against collusion, a player had to be significantly better than the Soviet opposition. Tightly contested tournaments would always favor the Soviet bloc.

FIDE implemented matches to eliminate collusion in the Candidate tournaments. Was the primary objective of the earlier 'Botvinnik rule' to eliminate collusion in Interzonals rather than to favor Botvinnik?

Cumulative Scores

In Chigorin Stumbles at Hastings 1895, I developed a new database query that generated a table showing the round-by-round progress of the leaders at Hastings 1895. It's a useful tool to identify the critical games in a round-robin (all-play-all) event.

I liked the concept so much that I used it to generate a similar table -- I call it a 'Cumulative Score' -- for each of the following World Championship events...

• 1948 FIDE Title Tournament
  
• 1950 Budapest Candidates Tournament
  
• 1953 Zurich Candidates Tournament
  
• 1956 Amsterdam Candidates Tournament
  
• 1959 Yugoslavia Candidates Tournament
  
• 1962 Curacao Candidates Tournament

...i.e. the first FIDE World Championship and the five candidate events covered by the study that I criticized in Calculating Collusion.

The cumulative score for the 1948 FIDE title event, where play was divided between The Hague and Moscow, is shown on the left. The three character codes at the top of the table are abbreviations for the five players who participated in the event: Botvinnik, Euwe, Keres, Reshevsky, and Smyslov; the blank cells (e.g. Botvinnik in Rd.1) show who had the bye in a round; and the dark horizontal lines show the end of each round-robin stage and the beginning of the next.

The 1948 event didn't appear to be particularly suspenseful. Botvinnik took the lead during the first stage, never relinquished it, and was assured of first place after the 22nd round. There was, however, a tight battle for second place, where Reshevsky missed his chance by losing in the 24th round (to Botvinnik).

A cumulative score is useful for understanding first person narratives like that by Keres in 'Grandmaster of Chess - The Complete Games of Paul Keres' (p.295). It started,

In the spring of 1948 I went to Holland in order to contest, at long last, the highest chess title in the world. For various reasons Fine declined to participate and so this left five of us to embark on this momentous conflict. From the very first rounds a fierce struggle developed and this continued right to the very last games. I began the tournament with two wins, against Euwe and Smyslov, but then lost in the ensuing rounds against Reshevsky and Botvinnik and at the end of the first tour I stood equal with Smyslov in third and fourth places.

About the third stage he wrote,

I came to within 1.5 points of Botvinnik and now everything hung on our individual encounter. In the event of a win I would come to within half a point of the leader and the issue of the tournament would be once again wide open.

This deciding encounter had a most complicated and exciting course and constituted a stiff test for the nerves of both players. Out of a complicated middlegame I succeeded in evolving a position of the most promising kind. Then, however, I failed to utilize my opportunities to the best advantage and the scales tipped over in Botvinnik's favor. Then there ensued a whole series of inaccuracies committed by both sides and when the game was eventually adjourned a double Rook endgame with an extra Pawn for Botvinnik had arisen.

When play was resumed Botvinnik did not find the best line and a Rook ending resulted that should have been easily drawn. But the vicissitudes of the game were by no means ended. Both sides conducted the game imprecisely and it was I who made the last mistake. By the time the second adjournment came Botvinnik had an easily won position and I suffered a bitter defeat. With this win Botvinnik had in practice ensured for himself victory in the tournament since with only eight more games to be played he already had a lead of 2.5 points.

The cumulative score indicates that this was the game played in round 15. Keres' description of its 'vicissitudes' is hard to reconcile with conspiracy theorists who claim he was under orders to let Botvinnik win the tournament. Keres' account also shows that the event was more suspenseful than the crosstable alone would indicate.

Calculating Collusion

Continuing with the series on Soviet collusion in the 1950s and 1960s (see the previous post Solutions to Collusion), in 2006 Charles C. Moul and John V. Nye, both university professors in economics, published a study of the subject: Did the Soviets Collude? A Statistical Analysis of Championship Chess 1940-64.

Abstract: We expand the set of outcomes considered by the tournament literature to include draws and use games from post-war chess tournaments to see whether strategic behavior is important in such scenarios. In particular, we examine whether players from the former Soviet Union acted as a cartel in international tournaments - intentionally drawing against one another in order to focus effort on non-Soviet opponents - to maximize the chance of some Soviet winning. Using data from international qualifying tournaments as well as USSR national tournaments, we estimate models to test for collusion. Our results are consistent with Soviet draw-collusion and inconsistent with Soviet competition. Simulations of the period's five premier international competitions (the FIDE Candidates tournaments) suggest that the observed Soviet sweep was a 75%-probability event under collusion but only a 25%-probability event had the Soviet players not colluded.

Of the five Candidate Tournaments in the study -- Budapest 1950 through Curacao 1962 -- the Curacao event has always received the most attention, largely due to Fischer's public accusation of Soviet cheating. It was, however, the 1953 Zurich Candidates Tournament where collusion, if it occurred, caused the most damage to the chances of the non-Soviet players, Reshevsky in particular. Moul and Nye's findings for the event are summarized in the following table.

Focusing on the line for Reshevsky, the authors wrote, 'Our calculations indicate that he had a 27% chance of winning a fair tournament. With collusion, his chances fell to 8%.' As convincing as these numbers might be, the result is flawed, relying, as it did, on the Sonas Chessmetric historical ratings. On several occasions in the past I've taken issue with Sonas's results when they failed the test of common sense. This is another case.

The last column in the table ('No cartel: % win') is based on the 'Rating' column, as calculated by Sonas. The top three ratings are Reshevsky (2780.99), Smyslov (2764.92), and Najdorf (2753.04), which is the first red flag (the six digit accuracy is also suspicious, but I won't dwell on it). The authors infer from these ratings that 'Retroactive grading has shown that Reshevsky was the favorite going into the 1953 Candidates' tournament.' While he was certainly one of the favorites, I can't imagine that many chess historians, after examination of the games between the two players (Vasily Smyslov vs. Samuel Reshevsky, Chessgames.com), where the post-WWII results give a +4-0=9 advantage to Smyslov, would argue that Reshevsky was stronger than Smyslov in 1953.

The second red flag concerns four players bunched within a range of three rating points -- Bronstein (2723.87), Boleslavsky (2722.33), Stahlberg (2721.93), and Keres (2721.02) -- implying that Stahlberg was the equal of Bronstein, Boleslavsky, and Keres. A look at the historical record shows that Bronstein drew a title match with Botvinnik in 1951, that Boleslavsky drew a playoff match with Bronstein after the 1950 Candidates, losing only in tiebreak, and that Keres finished tied with Reshevsky in the 1948 title tournament. Stahlberg finished behind Bronstein and Boleslavsky in the 1948 Interzonal (Keres was exempt) and behind all three in the 1950 Candidates; had a lifetime negative score against each of the three; and finished 15th and dead last in the 1953 Candidates, 3.5 points behind second-to-last Euwe (Bronstein and Keres finished tied with Reshevsky for 2nd-4th). Stahlberg was an excellent player, one of the West's best at that time ('among the world's best ten for a few years around 1950', according to Hooper & Whyld), but he was not at the same level as the three Soviets.

Why are the Sonas calculations so misleading? My theory is that they fail to account for the Soviet era social barrier ('Iron Curtain', anyone?) between Soviet players and Western players. Soviet players rarely played in Western events and Western players were even rarer participants in Soviet events. The two groups played in different, almost separate chess universes. A comparison of their performances requires a calibration of the separate calculations, using the few events where they actually met. It is as though the Soviets were measured with a meterstick, the Westerners measured with a yardstick, and no one bothered to check that the meterstick and the yardstick were the same length. I also suspect that Sonas overlooked many Soviet events. Moul and Nye wrote,

[The Sonas] rating does require a minimum number of observed games to construct. Games without Sonas chess-ratings for both players are dropped from the sample. While this leads to the omission of a few Interzonal games, the vast majority of dropped games are from URS championships. These omissions will presumably drive up the average observed skill of Soviet players in URS championships, and thereby make our comparison to FIDE events even more compelling.

I have a problem with that last sentence. Because the 'dropped games' would be predominantly wins by the better players, and the kept games predominantly draws between players of equivalent ability, I would presume exactly the opposite. Near the start of their paper, the authors wrote,

For the purposes of econometric analysis, chess has numerous advantages which are not common in other sports. [...] Most important of all is that there exists a rating system which is a precise and accurate reflection of the performances of players and which is an excellent indicator of the relative strengths of players.

This prerequisite was not delivered by the Sonas system. There might have been collusion among the Soviet players, but it is not shown by this study.

Where's Smyslov?