CHESS IS MY LIFE

Author: Viktor Korchnoi

Edition Olms (Hardback, 2005)

http://www.edition-olms.com/

In the U.S. http://www.trafalgarsquarebooks.com/

226 pages

Free CD with 4280 of Korchnoi’s games added to the inside cover

$39.95

Reviewed by IM John Donaldson

Ask a knowledgeable player to list the strongest players never to become World Champion and the names that are going to come up again and again are Akiva Rubinstein, Paul Keres and Viktor Korchnoi. Change the question to the strongest players over sixty-years old and the list will be Emanuel Lasker, Vassily Smyslov and once again Viktor Korchnoi. There can be no doubt that Korchnoi is one of the most unique and compelling figures in chess for the last half century. Fortunately he is not just a great player but has a burning desire to share his insights. The past few years have seen him share his legacy through two books of his best games (both published by Olms) and two DVDs produced by ChessBase.

An earlier book with the same title – CHESS IS MY LIFE – was written by Korchnoi nearly twenty-years ago but it bears little relation to the present work which is unique in chess literature. It’s not so much that it covers all of Korchnoi’s life from his formative years when he lived through the terrible blockade of Leningrad during the Second World War to the three epic matches with Karpov. No, what makes this book unique is Korchnoi’s frankness. He tells things as he sees them and doesn’t mince words. For example when discussing the character of Dutch Grandmaster Jan Hein Donner whom he clearly despised, Korchnoi quotes Bent Larsen about Donner: “Everything that he said was exceptionally interesting, but it was all untrue!”

More than a few of Korchnoi’s colleagues from his Soviet days come in for harsh criticism, but Viktor Lvovich doesn’t grant himself immunity. He tells of the traditional “Friends and Rivals” match between the USSR and Yugoslavia held in Leningrad in the summer of 1957. The Yugoslavs complained throughout the event about the poor service and poor food as well as the difficulty of sleeping through the white nights. Gligoric was the only one to play well. Korchnoi then writes: “He won against me with Black. Apparently this loss greatly upset me. In his memoirs Gligoric recalls that on his last day, accompanying him to the railway station, in the conversation I kept returning to our game and promised to beat him next time. Frankly speaking, not very hospitable...”

CHESS IS MY LIFE makes for fascinating reading as Korchnoi touches upon almost every important chess event in the last fifty-years from the Soviet Championships, Curacao, the matches with Spassky and Petrosian, to the current system for running the World Championship. Every chess player of a certain age knows about Tal getting hit with a bottle in a Cuban bar during the 1966 Olympiad, but here you get the details and the ramifications. Despite having the absolute best score in the Olympiad – 9.5 from 11 – Tal was punished. Two years later, just before departing for the Olympiad in Lugano, the team was gathered together and at the last moment Tal was told he wasn’t going. The beneficiary, the enigmatic Smyslov, who on several occasions used his “blat” (Russian for influence and power) to push his way to the front of the line.

Korchnoi has his own memories of certain events but no one’s can be perfect and certainly not for all the details. When discussing the boycott by Soviet and East European players of certain events he was participating in after his defection, Korchnoi shares some mixed memories on pages 158 and 163. He writes: “As for the Soviet boycott, its origins were revealed when Romanishin and Yusupov accidentally arrived at the tournament in Lone Pine, when I was already there. A multi-stage exchange of telegrams and letters were required and finally the central organ of power in the USSR, the Communist Party, graciously allowed the Grandmasters to participate side by side with me in the tournament. These documents were redeemed by me from the office of he Communist Party Central Committee in 1994.”

The actual story, which I remember because I played at Lone Pine 1981, and confirmed with published accounts of the time, is Yusupov and Romanishin arrived in Lone Pine on the bus from Los Angeles International Airport with most of the players the day before the first round. There were rumors but no Korchnoi at the players meeting that evening, but the next morning he miraculously appeared. As I recall, he had been forced to pull a Van Riemsdyk – a maneuver named after the Brazilian IM who a few years earlier had been forced to hire a cab for the 200 miles between LA and Lone Pine – and arrived around midnight several hundred dollars poorer. So Korchnoi was definitely there after rather than before Romanishin and Yusupov, who were stuck in the middle of things. Korchnoi had called the Soviet government’s bluff as it would have looked silly asking its two players to fly all the way back home without playing. That was how the boycott was broken and, when Korchnoi and Yusupov played, they shook hands and Viktor won a very nice game.

Besides the lively writing, another nice thing about this book are the wonderful photos throughout. There are images of Korchnoi throughout his life from when he was a kid to the present. Some of them are quite surprising like the one with Viktor K. and Jimmy Carter – taken not when the latter was President but Governor of Georgia. Remember Korchnoi played his Candidate’s match with Mecking in Augusta? Another plus are the eight annotated games and the high quality example of chess composition (game 9). 

Last but not least the purchaser gets a nice little bonus, a CD with 4280 of Korchnoi’s games. Of course most of these are on Mega2006 but I counted about sixty that were not, about half before 1950.

This is a tremendous book that every chess player will find compelling reading. You may not agree with all of Kortchnoi’s observations, but the chess world is much richer for his having put pen to paper.

Highly Recommended 

To buy this amazing book at a $5.00 discount, click here: CHESS IS MY LIFE

Interested in a collection of Korchnoi’s best games (all deeply annotated) by the man himself? Then click on:

KORCHNOI BEST GAMES VOL 1 WHITE

KORCHNOI BEST GAMES VOL 2 BLACK