Chess Quantum Entanglement (In My Brain)
First of all, this blog post will expose my ignorance in ways that I don't even know ("you don't know what you don't know").
Second of all, I just want to share with you, once again, a commonality of patterns.....I wanted to title this post "Botvinnik learns from Bronstein", but the pattern in question is a system that is named after Botvinnik himself!
So, where do I start? Well, I was having a conversation with my friend from Iceland, Suren Torfi Leosson, about the fact that Gukesh lost the first game of his World Championship Match with Ding Liren, and that Petrosian also lost the first game of his WC Match with Botvinnik in 1963, but then went on to win the match! Karpov lost the first game of his Candidates Match with Spassky in 1974, but went on to win the match!
In the process of the conversation, I was describing how Petrosian got crushed by Botvinnik, who played ....Re8 in the opening, and prevented Petosian from deploying his knight to f4.....
And, after the conversation, my memory started clicking..... "wait a minute, isn't this the system that Botvinnik himself champions with White, where White plays f3 and tries to advance e4? Is this the same scheme he used to beat the great Capablanca at the AVRO Tournament in 1938?"
Ok, so far, so good. But here's where the entanglement kicks in.....I also saw, recently in Romanovsky's book, "Soviet Middlegame Technique",
the following game, in which Botvinnik was crushed by Kotov.....who, played the same ...Re8 move with which Botvinnik prevented Petrosian from maneuvering to f4 with his knight!
Please notice the similarities of this position with the Petrosian Botvinnik game from 1963! Not in vain it is said that you learn more from your losses.....the way Kotov crushed Botvinnik in this game is nothing short of domination!
By the time White played Nf4, he had chosen the wrong plan......playing on the queenside, when he should have played for the e4 break!
Fast forward to 1951....game 17 of the Botvinnik-Bronstein World Championship Match.....Bronstein succeeds in confusing Botvinnik, and as a result Botvinnik's pieces lack coordination to some degree.....
The first time I encountered this scheme was many years ago, when studying the German edition of Euwe's book about the 1953 Candidates Tournament.....the following position was a "Tabiya" in the Nimzo-Indian, and was played in quite a few games in this tournament....
Now, many of these Nimzo-Indian games ended in draws...but Taimanov, who Bronstein describes as an optimist, crushed Petrosian with Botvinnik's idea of f3 and e4!
Epilogue: I was wondering if Botvinnik came up with this scheme on his own, or if he saw it BEFORE playing Capablanca in 1938, and I found the following game, from the 1931 Olympiad in Prague:
As you can see from the diagram, Erdelyi chose the right plan!
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I have time for. Also, it is all I know. It is quite possible that this scheme, this formation, was played before 1931. But this I don't know.
All these games are very interesting, and usually I would spend a few hours putting either original comments from chess books, or my own. But instead of hours, now I only have minutes, so this will have to do. This is my story of "quantum entanglement" in my memory, my chess memory, in the inmost recesses of my brain.
Peace
