Comments, reviews, serendipity, and a complete anecdote!

One problem with running the blog is that I'm using g-mail for the attached email account, and for some reason I've had trouble getting g-mail accounts to work with Outlook. And since I don't check my g-mail account that often, I can miss comments on older posts.

One such comment was posted this last Sunday, on the post Incomplete Anecdote Alert! In that post I pointed out that I had left out an anecdote on a previous post, despite leaving the "room" for it in a sentence. Here's the relevant bit from the original post, Your Moves for the Day: h7-is-a-great-square-to-sack-a-piece Edition:

Here, Black is getting the worst of it. 

Morozevich vs. MVL

Position after 27 h5!?

27...Rh7!!

Anish Giri offered this assessment in his book After Magnus (a review of which will be forthcoming):

This stunning move doesn't save the game, but considering that the alternative was resignation, it is especially strong. Now Morozevich began to lose his cool. (pg 58)

[Incomplete Anecdote Alert! - ed.] Pace [name withheld due to poor memory], I can imagine certain players would rather resign the game than play such a move!

Later I realized I hadn't actually put the name of the player who would rather resign the game than play such a move. As I explained in An Incomplete Anecdote:

I forgot to put in the grandmaster's name after "pace". Whoops.

There was a reason for that, though. I couldn't quite remember which grandmaster had said in in relation to which move. (I'm sure it's been said many times by many players, but I've got a certain example in mind. It's somewhere in my books, but I can't remember which one. GRRR.

It drove me nuts until I forgot about it. But Sunday Paul posted the following comment on that post:

I think Taimanov said it, in reference to a game between Averbakh and Spassky in 1956, at least according to a poster in chessgames.com.

The reason I was looking back at the post in the first place was that I had also found the source of the quote just this afternoon! I had been reading a review of Tukmakov's latest book, Risk & Bluff in Chess: The Art of Taking Calculated Risks, at Dennis Monokroussos's site. DM mentions that Spassky features prominently in certain chapters of the book, which reminded me of a certain move of Spassky's that had been highlighted by the Dutch chessplayer and writer Tim Krabbé on his website CHESS CURIOSITIES.

Krabbé had once been inspired to create a list of The 110 Most Fantastic Moves Ever Played. Number one on his list was Spassky's move in the following position:

Averbakh-Spassky, Leningrad, 1956

Black to move

Spassky was in bad shape. His opening had failed, he was cramped, his king was about to get rolled, he had no counterplay. So he resorted to shenanigans.

16...Nc6?!!?

Krabbé wrote the following about the move on his site:

About his #1 greatest move, Spassky wrote to me: I have played 16...Nc6 because I did not see any other practical resources because my position was so passive. I was very surprised that Yuri Averbakh was thinking about 1 hour (!!) (55 min.) I considered that after 17.dxc6 bxc6 18.h6! Bh8 White would have two pieces up and they could manage the win very easy. Mark Taimanov: "I would rather resign the game than to make such a move..."

So now I know the source of my anecdote! The good news is that it wasn't in any of my books at all, so my memory didn't partially fail me, it completely failed me. (I hate doing things half-way.)

So for the record, I wrote about this on October 30, then Paul supplied the answer on November 15, Monokroussos wrote about Tukmakov's book on the 16th, which I read on the 17th, then I found the source at Krabbé's site before discovering that Paul had beat me to it by two days.

Incidentally, this was from a three man playoff to determine the winner of the XXIII Soviet Championship between Averbakh, Spassky and Taimanov, and the draw Spassky got in the above game was the only half-point he scored. The whole game is reproduced below.