The Greatest Attacker in Chess

Den eminente sjakkforfatteren Lakdawala serverer en bok om den sagnomsuste sovjetiske angrepsspilleren Rashid Nezhmetdinov. Bøkene om mannen og ikke minst partiene hans har vært utsolgt lenge.

Her kommer i stedet en ny og moderne bok der beundringen av idérikdommen til denne spilleren fascinerende nok matches med moderne analysemotorer. Nezhmetdinov var den spesielle mannen som vant herlige angrepspartier mot stjernespillere som Tal, Spasskij, Bronstein, Polugajevskij og Geller.

Ekstremt underholdende og lærerikt!

Forlagets egen omtale:

Rashid Nezhmetdinov (1912-1974) played fearless attacking chess. With his dazzling style, the Soviet master already was a legend during his lifetime, but international fame largely eluded him. Only once did he get permission to show his exceptional talent in a tournament abroad.

Five times Nezhmetdinov was chess champion of the Russian Federation. In the 1961 Soviet Championship, he won the ‘Best Game’ prize for a spectacular win against ... Mikhail Tal who praised his opponent for his ‘amazing creativity.’ Other stars that ‘Nezh’ defeated in grand style included Spassky, Polugaevsky, Bronstein, and Geller.

His games, full of tactical pyrotechnics, are his legacy and have reached an ever-growing audience. Nezhmetdinov’s shocking strategic queen sacrifice, in 1962 against Chernikov, as shown on Agadmator’s YouTube channel, has become the best-watched chess video of all time with millions of views.

In this book, Cyrus Lakdawala pays tribute to the genius of the enigmatic Nezhmetdinov, a Tatar who grew up as an orphan in the part of the Soviet Union that is now Kazakhstan. In more than one hundred impressive and instructive games and positions, Lakdawala shows how Nezhmetdinov fought for the initiative, how he bluffed and sacrificed, and how he kept his cool to out-calculate his opponents. Lakdawala’s lucid writing perfectly matches the power of ‘Nezh’s’ moves. This wonderful collection celebrates Nezhmetdinov as the Greatest Attacker in Chess.

Fra forordet:

Around twelve years ago, a friend of mine mentioned Nezhmetdinov’s name. I only had a vague, glimmering recollection that Nezhmetdinov had beaten Tal several times and that he had created an attacking masterpiece against Polugaevsky. That is where my knowledge of him ended. Then over the past few years on social media, I noticed that Nezhmetdinov’s name kept getting mentioned more and more, as a steady stream of his games and combinational excerpts began to be posted.

The chess world’s gradual introduction to Nezhmetdinov’s games is mostly due to the untiring efforts of Nezh super-fan Antonio Radic, also known as the Agadmator, who is by far the most successful chess YouTuber in the world, with a staggering 1,000,000 plus subscribers. Over and over, Antonio’s videos displayed Nezhmetdinov’s dazzling games, to the point where Nezh, the creator of some of the most imaginative and entertaining games in chess history, is now finally being embraced by a legion of new chess fans. In total, Nezhmetdinov’s games attracted more than 17 million views on YouTube and other chess video streams!

So thanks to Antonio, these once barely known gems have emerged from obscurity into full public view. Nezh was not a world champion, nor even a contender, yet his limitless tactical optimism and fiery games ignite our own imagination.

No Reverse Gear Nezh: his style

• Nezhmetdinov is the single most unconventional player I have ever known. Yasser Seirawan

• Rashid Nezhmetdinov is a virtuoso of combinational chess. David Bronstein

How do we develop our unique style? It develops from a combination of influences:

• 1. our natural stylistic ability
• 1. the books and players we study, especially in our youth
• 1. the players we associate with, especially our coaches

Robert Frost wrote a poem called ‘Accidentally on Purpose’, which is the perfect description of Nezh’s style: he joyfully plunged into the dangerous unknown, for the sheer adventure of it. In fact, Nezhmetdinov’s nickname was ‘No Reverse Gear Nezh’ since radical audacity and a refusal to back down were his norms.

My old student professor Joel Sneed once asked Boris Gulko what attracted the grandmaster to chess. Boris answered that he plays chess for the pure adventure of it. I can’t find a better description of Nezh’s motivation. He craved the thrill; the result of winning, drawing or losing was a secondary, less important factor. Charles Dickens wrote in Hard Times of ‘the wisdom of the head and the wisdom of the heart.’ For Nezh, it was all heart, while the head tended to be rudely ignored!

Conformity to ‘realism, correctness and functionality’ was the prevailing ethos of Soviet life in Nezhmetdinov’s lifetime. In fact, Stalin frowned upon non-functional abstraction in the arts, to the point where he persecuted those who created it. Two examples: Sergei Prokofiev was punished due to his music’s atonality, while the chess endgame study composer Arvid Kubbel, Leonid Kubbel’s lesser-known brother, was arrested in 1937 and executed. What monstrous crime had he committed to deserve execution? Treason, by mailing some of his composed works to be printed by foreign publications.

In Stalin’s era and its lingering after-effect when he died, chess composers were encouraged to create realistic, game-like studies. Abstract studies and helpmates were banned. Although Stalin was gone by 1953, his ‘realism, correctness and functionality’ zeitgeist pervaded the artistic community’s mindset. Botvinnik and Smyslov embraced this stylistic realism, where chess had to be played in sensible, logical fashion.