Paul Keres (1916-1975) was one of the greatest players never to become world champion. It was not through want of trying. For a full quarter of a century, starting from his victory at Avro 1938, one of the all-time premier tournaments in chess history, right up to Curaçao 1962, where he missed first place and a world title challenge by a hair’s breadth, Keres was a leading contender.
Keres became a national hero for Estonians, who believed that Soviet officials had coerced him into playing badly against the favoured Russian, Mikhail Botvinnik, in the 1948 world championship tournament. He was voted Estonia’s sportsperson of the year in 1959 and 1962, and later sportsperson of the 20th century. When he died of a heart attack in 1975, 100,000 attended his funeral. In 2016, Estonia’s national bank issued coins with Keres’s name and portrait to commemorate his centenary. His fans admired his modesty, elegance and patriotism as well as empathising with him over the fates which denied him a match for the world crown.
The mystery began in 1938, immediately after Keres’s victory at Avro, This was supposed to lead to a world title challenge to Alexander Alekhine, but a photo showed Avro officials and Keres yawning, with a caption explaining that Alekhine kept them waiting for 45 minutes. Years later, it emerged that Alekhine, who was representing France but hoped to return to his Russian homeland, had already had a secret meeting to arrange terms with Botvinnik.
Then came the second world war, when Alekhine and Keres, whose homeland was under German occupation, were regular participants in Nazi tournaments in 1941-43. Alekhine proposed that they should meet in a world championship match, but Keres declined, telling a friend: “If I won the match I’d gain a bunch of worthless German marks … it would be a match to become the champion of the part of the world occupied by the German army … If I lost the match I would for ever lose the chance to compete for the title following the inevitable end of the war.”
By mid-1944, when it was clear that Germany was losing, Keres moved to neutral Spain, then to Sweden and back to Estonia. The risks of staying under the renewed Soviet occupation were great but, when Keres and his family along with other public figures gathered on the coast to emigrate, the ship to Sweden failed to appear. Some of those involved were sent to the Gulag but Keres was spared. A top Communist official was on his side and Keres also sent a personal letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin’s No 2, pleading to resume his chess career. It seems likely that he had to promise not to spoil Botvinnik’s world championship campaign.
By 1947 he was rehabilitated, able to compete and win the USSR Championship in Leningrad in Botvinnik’s absence. However, at the start of the tournament there was a complaint about his participation where Keres was described as “a fascist”, while after he suffered his only defeat, against the local master Konstantin Klaman, the winner exclaimed to the other players: “Hey, comrades, I killed a fascist!”
At the start of the 1948 world championship, Keres was the clear second favourite to Botvinnik and began his campaign with a sparkling win against Max Euwe. Then he lost his first four games to Botvinnik, the second in only 23 moves.
In their fifth game, with the world title decided for Botvinnik, Keres won against the French Defence in his characteristic open attacking style, in contrast to his passive approach of the four previous games.
Was there a smoking gun? Opinion in 1948 pinpointed Keres’s weak play in a rook ending in their third game but Keres himself analysed that game in detail in his book of the tournament, pointing out errors on both sides. More likely is that Keres was oppressed by his coercion years earlier and that this sparked his unduly conservative approach. Open games were his speciality, not the closed positions he chose against Botvinnik.
Between 1953 and 1962 Keres was second in four consecutive Candidates tournaments, to Vasily Smyslov in 1953 and 1956, to Mikhail Tal in 1959, and to Tigran Petrosian in 1962. Misfortune dogged him at the decisive moments. In 1953 in his second game with Smyslov he launched an all-out attack, but failed to take a drawing chance, overpressed and lost. In 1956, again fighting for first with Smyslov, he blundered fatally against the tailender Miroslav Filip in the penultimate round.
By the time of the 1959 and 1962 Candidates, Keres was well past age 40 and the biological clock was ticking, but he still made a mighty effort to achieve his goal in Yugoslavia in 1959, by which time it seemed that the political pressures had subsided. He liked to visit England and was able to compete at Hastings in 1954-55, when he tied with Smyslov, and 1957-58, when he won outright.
In December 1957 the Hastings pairings were decided two weeks before the tournament, and I found that I was due to face my chess hero in the very first round. Many hours of preparation went into the King’s Indian against 1 d4 and the Richter Sicilian against 1 e4. Came the day, and Keres shook hands, smiled politely, then advanced … 1 c2-c4! Not only that, he followed up with a rare central pawn formation at c4-d3-e4-f4.
After elegantly defeating me with his ranging bishop pair, Keres revealed that he had seen the pairing in a newspaper, realised that I would be ready for his normal openings, so decided to vary.
It seemed at the time that he chose a one-off formation to take me out of theory but then, nearly two years later against Tal in the Candidates, he brought out the idea again. Keres actually defeated Tal 3-1 in their mini-match, but dropped too many points elsewhere.
His final effort at Curaçao 1962 came in the shadow of Bobby Fischer’s allegations that the Soviet grandmasters were colluding. Indeed, there was a short draw pact among Petrosian, Geller and Keres, which was sparked by the marathon 28 rounds in a hot climate, but this was only possible because Fischer himself was in poor form.
For Keres, the penultimate Candidates round was a tragedy, and an eerie repeat of 1956 against Filip. This time it was Pal Benko, whose previous record against Keres was 0-7, who scored a shock win one round from the finish. The final leading scores were Petrosian 17.5/27, Keres and Geller 17, so that this single game decided the Candidates.
1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 Nf6 3 e5 Nd5 4 Nc3 e6 5 Nxd5 exd5 6 d4 d6 7 Bg5 Qa5+ 8 c3! cxd4 9 Bd3! dxc3 10 O-O cxb2 11 Rb1 dxe5 12 Nxe5 Bd6 13 Nxf7! Kxf7 14 Qh5+ g6 15 Bxg6+ hxg6 16 Qxh8 Bf5 17 Rfe1 Be4 18 Rxe4 dxe4 19 Qf6+ 1-0
Nowadays, the world championship cycle has been reduced from four years to two, so no current elite grandmaster has suffered the fate of Keres. For amateurs, he is an excellent role model. Play over and study his games, and your own attacking skills will blossom.
3887 1...Rf3+ 2 Kg2 Rxf4! 3 gxf4 Rg8+ 4 Kf3 Bg4+ 5 Kg3 Bf5+ and wins.
