On 31st January 2024 we will publish two new books in hardcover only.
Boris Spassky’s Best Games 1 by Tibor Karolyi. You can read an excerpt here.
And Understanding Chess Exchanges by Bagheri & Salehzadeh.
You can read an excerpt here.
In both cases the titles give a good idea of the contents and themes of the books, but the excerpts will give an even better idea. I hope you enjoy them.
All the best for Christmas and the New Year from everyone at Quality Chess.
Hmmm.
Spassky did not get the Grandmaster title for winning the world junior, he got it for qualifying for the candidates the same year.
The World Junior champion got an IM title automatically, not a GM.
A small mistake, by the 70’s I think it was true. Anyway, I am more interested in the analysis of the games. It looks much better than the New in chess book on Spassky in that regard.
@Thomas
Hi Thomas,
The excerpt does not say he got a GM title for winning the World Junior Championship. The paragraph summing up the 1955 achievements says
“He became World Junior Champion, as well as the youngest grandmaster in the world.”
Considering the paragraph lists many other achievements and results, I read the above sentence as stating two different facts, not the second being dependent on the first. Also, he was an IM earlier in the 1950s and as you point at at that time in 1955, the winner only received the IM title (if they did not already hold it).
The excerpt says
“Spassky won the rest of his games until the final round, when, with his overall victory already secure, he took an early draw. He thus became World Junior Champion and earned the grandmaster title.”
That’s not quite correct, although not a big deal.
@Thomas
I did not read that part of the text buried in the game notes. I read the final paragraph of the excerpt, which is where I thought you were referring to.
Sorry about that Thomas, it is obviously incorrect.
That is indeed something to fix at the next opportunity. I checked and the author trusted a Hungarian source that was wrong.
In the book Karolyi shows a game of Spassky’s against Guillermo Garcia Gonzalez from Sochi 1964.
Guillermo (1953-1986) was 11 years old in that year.
It was Gilberto Garcia who played in Sochi.