Reviewed by John Watson

ChessBase has released an absolutely amazing piece of historical research entitled THE GREATEST TOURNAMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF CHESS 1851-1986. This disc can give almost endless pleasure to the browser, and high-class instruction for any who want it. It covers the careers of all the great names of chess history via the tournaments in which they played. The main criterion for a tournament’s inclusion is the presence of several players ranked in the top ten at the time of the tournament, normally with a couple in the top four. Sometimes the historical significance of the tournament is of overriding importance even if the competition was not quite as fierce. Every tournament has a report attached to it with first-hand accounts mixed into the writing, and some wonderful photographs. These reports are compiled and written by the first-rate chess historian Manual Fruth, who has used contemporary sources such as newspaper articles and tournament books. He also annotates some of the key games. Fruth is one of those extraordinary chess researchers who isn’t appreciated by the general chess public. He is also, I discovered, an author, publisher, and owner of a chess antiques business. As usual, the CD also contains the ChessBase Reader program and separate databases of each individual tournament with all of the game played in it.

I should point out what’s not included:  “Official” tournaments are saved for another disc. This means World Championship qualifying events such as Candidates and Interzonal tournaments. Interestingly, editor Rainer Knaak also excludes New York 1927 because he considers it a qualifier; I can’t agree with his reasoning but this is the only controversial case that I can see. In a review on ChessBase.com Steve Lopez bemoans the omission of Zurich 1953, but that was a Candidates tournament (World Championship qualifier). Also, notice that the end date is 1986. This avoids the problem that there have been so many super-tournaments since that time which have included only the world’s top players with perhaps one or two others. Thus in the last 15 years we have often seen tournaments which include, for example, numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10 in the world, or 2, 3, 5, 7 or something similar; sometimes there have been 3 such tournaments in a year. By contrast, this CD mostly gives us the classic tournaments that we grew up admiring, i.e., those which matched great players who rarely met each other over the board. These naturally had more drama because of their rarity. Rainer Knaak in his Introduction mentions the difficulties in the selection process that eliminated, for example, Baden-Baden 1870 and Wien 1882. Indeed, I would question the inclusion of Dallas 1957 that featured only numbers 4 and 6 in the world, but in general the selection shouldn’t be controversial.

One can lose untold hours jumping around this disc. Having such a complete record with the stories and all the crosstables provides many interesting things that most chess histories neglect, i.e., how players were invited, who did badly in these famous tournaments, who won the first- and second- Brilliancy Prizes (often one for each round), and much more. Just browsing around, I was surprised to see the following facts:

(a) The rarity of draws in the earliest tournaments is shocking. In the London 1851 knockout tournament that established Anderssen as the world’s leading player, only 7 of 85 games were drawn. In the Master tournament of the First American Chess Congress in 1857, that ratio skyrocketed to 8 draws out of 70 games.

(b) Who would have thought that Teichman of all people would have won the powerful Karlsbad 1911, a full point ahead of Rubinstein and Schlechter at their peaks, in a tournament that included Marshall, Nimzowitsch, Spielmann, Duras (extremely strong at the time), Vidmar, Tartakower, a young Alekhine, and many others? Teichman was called “Richard V” for his 5th place finishes, but with the benefit of hindsight he has to be one of the most unlikely victors of a super-tournament.

(c) Although it’s probably well known to fans of chess history, I admit that I had no idea that Vladimirs Petrovs tied for first place with Reshevsky and Flohr (both near their peaks) in the famous Kemeri 1937 tournament, ahead of Alekhine, Keres, Fine, Stahlberg, etc.! An astonishing feat, especially over 17 rounds, and Petrovs even lost a totally won game in time trouble versus Reshevsky. Who was this guy? Befuddled, I called to John Donaldson, who with his customary erudition was able to fill me in on Petrovs’ life and his tragic end just a few years later. One wonders whether he would have become a world-class player but for the whims of fortune.

(d) There were several instances of dramatic swings in results. For example, Fritz Saemisch took 3rd place in the powerful Baden-Baden tournament of 1925. Then, in the same year, he finished 18th in the 1st Moscow International tournament.

(e) You can find a lot of surprising failures. Just one example: Geller finished dead last in the “Tournament of the Stars” in Moscow 1981 with a miserable 4 points of 13. Surely one of the worst, if not the worst, result in his career as a leading grandmaster.

(f) Sometimes a player catches your eye, for example, Maroczy, who played more games (198) in these tournaments of anyone except Lasker (256), Tartakower (239), Spielmann (221) and Marshall (202).  Because he appeared so often and had decent but not exceptional results (2nd place behind Lasker in Nuremberg 1896/7 was his best Super-tournament), I decided to check the rest of his record. Maybe it’s just me, but I always had the impression that Maroczy was a fine player who wasn’t really among the world’s elite. Looking at Jeff Sonas’ historical ratings, one finds that Maroczy was actually the world’s highest rated player in 1906, was in the top 5 for 12 years, and was in the top 15 for 34 years! His ranking and successes absolutely swamp most of his better-known contemporaries who were not World Champions, e.g., Spielmann, Schlechter, Marshall, Janowsky, Tartakower, Vidmar, Teichman, etc. Only Tarrasch was clearly better, whereas Nimzowitsch and Rubinstein had very similar overall standings.

I did find an error with respect to drawing frequency, although it has nothing to with the compilers. In his contemporary report on Bled 1931, Kmoch says, “Only 39 of the 182 games ended with a draw!” I was taken in by this astonishing statistic and only later decided to check it. In fact, 85 (47%) were drawn. There was one amazing thing about this tournament, however: its result. Alekhine won by 5.5 points ahead of second-place Bogoljubow!

The CD has 6843 games in all, with every game from the tournaments and some from side tournaments and simultaneous exhibitions. Many of these are annotated in the normal sense of the word. But ChessBase also counts as “annotated” a lot of other games with just some merged games in the notes and few if any words. That’s the standard practice with today’s electronic products (e.g., those by ChessBase and Convekta); it’s not terribly important, perhaps, but something to keep in mind as a customer. In general, THE GREATEST TOURNAMENTS should not be looked upon as an annotated games collection but rather a historical and reference work. A nice touch is that the Brilliancy Prize games and other games of special interest from each tournament are linked to the database, so that you can instantly play over the game referred to.

The 50 tournaments on the disc are as follows, with the rank of the top players given in the right column:

No.  Tournament                Nos. 1-10 Top ten

 1.  London 1851                -

 2.  New York 1857            -

 3.  Vienna 1873                1, 2, 4, 7

 4.  Leipzig 1877               3, 5, 6

 5.  London 1883                1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10

 6.  Hastings 1895              1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10

 7.  St Petersburg 1895         2, 3, 4, 6

 8.  Nuernberg 1896             1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10

 9.  Vienna 1898                2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10

10.  London 1899                1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10

11.  Paris 1900                 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

12.  Cambridge Springs 1904     1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

13.  St Petersburg 1909         1, 4, 5, 6, 7

14.  San Sebastian 1911         2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

15.  Karlsbad 1911              2, 5, 7, 8, 10

16.  San Sebastian 1912         3, 5, 7, 9, 10

17.  St Petersburg 1914         1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10

18.  Mährisch 1923              2, 8, 9, 10

19.  New York 1924              1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8

20.  Baden-Baden 1925           3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10

21.  Moscow 1925                1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10

22.  Bad Kissingen 1928         2, 5, 6, 8, 10

23.  Karlsbad 1929              2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10

24.  San Remo 1930              1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10

25.  Bled 1931                  1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10

26.  Moscow 1935+36             2, 3, 6, 9 / 1, 2, 7, 8

27.  Nottingham 1936            1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10

28.  Kemeri 1937                2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10

29.  AVRO 1938                  1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10

30.  Salzburg 1942              2, 7

31.  Sverdlovsk 1943            3, 4, 8

32.  Groningen 1946             1, 4, 8, 9

33.  Moscow 1956                1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10

34.  Dallas 1957                4, 6

35.  Bled 1961                  1, 5, 6, 9, 10

36.  Los Angeles 63             1, 4

37.  Capablanca 63              3, 8, 9

38.  Santa Monica 1966          1, 2, 5, 10

39.  Moscow 1967                3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

40.  Moscow 1971                2, 3, 5, 9, 10

41.  San Antonio 1972           3, 5, 7, 9

42.  Milan 1975                 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10

43.  Moscow 1975                3, 4, 5, 8

44.  Leningrad 1977             1, 6

45.  Bugojno 1978               1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8

46.  Tilburg 1978               3, 4, 7, 8

47.  Montreal 1979              1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10

48.  Moscow 1981                1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

49.  Bugojno 1986               2, 3, 4, 9-11

50.  Tilburg 1986               2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

This collection is fun and informative. It is also a masterpiece of research. I’d be extremely surprised if any book comes remotely close to its detailed description of so many great tournaments in one place. For my taste it is the best electronic product yet put together.