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Clicking on the picture will transport you to a detailed account of one of the
great historical matches of the 20th century. This match, played in a
grueling four-day ordeal with the moves transmitted between Moscow and New York
via radiotelegraphy, took place in the closing hours of WWII - in fact,
President Truman declared V. J. Day on September 2, the second day of the
match.
Reuben Fine's 1983 book, The World's Greatest Chess Games,
featured one of the games, a Ruy Lopez between Smyslov and Reshevsky.
Botvinnik chose his game against Denker as of of the entries in his 1960 book,
Botvinnik: 100 Selected Games.
The American team was comprised of players many of whom had been
part of the pre-war, American-dominated world games, the Chess Olympiads. The
Soviet team consisted of one of the strongest line-up of players one could
imagine in retrospect in which the new-comer chess whiz, David Bronstein played
the lowly last board.
Most important, the match introduced the powerful USSR
chess machine to the world and was, indeed,
the Soviet Coming-out Party
An acknowledgement : Although
this is published on my Chess site, a great deal of what turned out to be a
tremendous amount of work was performed by my dear friend, Deb. Not only did she
supply me with the bulk of the source material, she also rendered the games into
pgn format with computer analysis and painstakingly converted the original
annotations into text.
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