Description
The winner of the prestigious FIDE 2021 Book of the Year award!
This is the special hardback edition and is back in stock! The Life Games of the Seventh World Chess Champion Vasily Smyslov, the seventh world champion, had a long and illustrious chess career.
He played close to 3,000 tournament games over seven decades, from the time of Lasker and Capablanca to the days of Anand and Carlsen. From 1948 to 1958, Smyslov participated in four world championships, becoming world champion in 1957. Smyslov continued playing at the highest level for many years and made a stunning comeback in the early 1980s, making it to the finals of the candidates’ cycle. Only the indomitable energy of 20yearold Garry Kasparov stopped Smyslov from qualifying for another world championship match at the ripe old age of 63!
In this first volume of a multi volume set, Russian FIDE master Andrey Terekhov traces the development of young Vasily from his formative years and becoming the youngest grandmaster in the Soviet Union to finishing second in the world championship match tournament. With access to rare Sovietera archival material and invaluable family archives, the author complements his account of Smyslov’s growth into an elite player with dozens of fascinating photographs, many never seen before, as well as 49 deeply annotated games. German grandmaster Karsten Muller’s special look at Smyslov’s endgames rounds out this fascinating first volume.
The foreword is by former Russian champion Peter Svidler who writes . This book is an extremely well researched look at his life and games, a very welcome addition to the body of work about Smyslov.
Hardback, 536 pages. Dimensions 155 x 236 x 30mm, 794g.
