Zurich 1953 Candidates Tournament

◇Choosing a challenger

The 1953 Candidates Tournament existed to produce a single challenger for Botvinnik's world title. Fifteen players met each other twice. With an odd number of players one sat out each round, so the event ran to 30 rounds of seven games: 210 games in all, 28 for each player. The Swiss Chess Federation spent 100,000 Swiss francs to stage it. First prize was 5,000 francs and the last three finishers received 500 each, Amílcar Celaya recorded in his preface to Najdorf's book; to save money, each country paid its own players' travel. The problemist Alois Nagler directed.

The field was extraordinary: Smyslov, Bronstein, Reshevsky, Keres, the young Tigran Petrosian, Najdorf, Geller, Kotov, Taimanov, Averbakh, Boleslavsky, Szabo, Gligorić, former champion Max Euwe, and Gideon Ståhlberg. Nine of the fifteen came from the Soviet Union, whose delegation of some 25 people, headed by Dmitry Postnikov, brought its own doctor. Grandmasters such as Salo Flohr, Lilienthal, Bondarevsky and Tolush came only as seconds. Every player had a second except Reshevsky and Bronstein, whose second, Konstantinopolsky, fell ill before the start.

◇Neuhausen and Zürich

At the opening banquet Smyslov sang an aria from Italian opera, and Taimanov, a concert pianist, played Tchaikovsky and Chopin. Play began before a large crowd in the Kirchgemeindehaus, the parish hall of Neuhausen am Rheinfall. After three rounds Najdorf noted that none of the players drank and only Reshevsky and Geller smoked; the real difficulty, he wrote, was “eating after the third or fourth hour of play.”

For religious reasons Reshevsky did not play on Friday nights or on Saturdays before nightfall, and his games were scheduled around the Sabbath. Bronstein explained in his book that on Saturdays Reshevsky started “after the rise of the evening star”, while on Fridays “he played his games during the day, so as to finish before the rise of that same star.” In round 4 Szabó arrived at the usual hour although his game against Reshevsky would not start until 9 p.m., watched the other boards for four hours, and then lost.

Round 8 was the last in Neuhausen. Najdorf wrote that the players left “not without regret,” remembering their walks and “the distant murmur of the falls of the Rhine, which had accompanied the silence of the playing hall.” The tournament moved to Zürich, where the second cycle began on Sunday, 27 September.

◇The race for first

The lead changed hands early. Reshevsky led alone after round 6 and again after rounds 8 to 11. A local factory had donated a gold watch for the best score over the first seven rounds; Reshevsky and Smyslov were level, so both received one. Smyslov took over in round 12, and at the halfway mark he was the only unbeaten player, on 9½ to the 8½ of Bronstein and Reshevsky.

Reshevsky had his share of luck. In round 19 Szabó, with plenty of time on his clock, overlooked a mate in two against him, and the game was drawn. In round 21 Kotov handed Smyslov his only defeat; the headline, Najdorf wrote, was not “Kotov Wins!” but “Smyslov Loses!” Reshevsky drew level and stayed level for three rounds.

Smyslov beat Keres in round 24 and Reshevsky in round 25. Bronstein wrote that the Reshevsky game, together with his own loss to Geller in the same round, “decided first prize, for all practical purposes.” Smyslov then drew his last five games, clinching first place with an 11-move draw against Najdorf in round 29, and finished on 18/28, two points clear.

Bronstein, Reshevsky and Keres were level on 15½ going into the last round, which fell on a Friday. Reshevsky asked that the other two also play in the morning, but their opponents, Gligorić and Najdorf, did not want their own rivals to know their results in advance either, and the three games were played at different times of day. All three were drawn, leaving them shared second on 16. A three-man playoff was planned, but Bronstein and Keres declined to play it, according to a note by Najdorf's translator, Taylor Kingston. The 24-year-old Petrosian finished fifth in his first Candidates.

At the closing gala in the Zürich Kongresshaus on 24 October, the arbiter, Karel Opocensky, declared Smyslov challenger in the name of FIDE and gave him a crown of laurels. Smyslov's 1954 match with Botvinnik was drawn 12–12 and Botvinnik kept the title, but Smyslov would return to win the championship outright in 1957.

◇East and West

Najdorf counted 108 games between Soviet and Western players. The Soviet players won 34 of them and lost 17. Games between Soviet players averaged 35 moves, games between Western players 39, and games between the two groups 42, which he read as a tendency for both sides “to fight more intensely against the ‘other side’ than among themselves.”

Nearly fifty years later Bronstein gave his own account, in the Russian magazine 64 in 2001 and later in Secret Notes, of how members of the Soviet delegation tried to arrange the finish so that Smyslov would qualify ahead of Reshevsky. A note in the English edition of Najdorf's book cites his statement that his 21-move draw with Smyslov in round 26 was ordered by Postnikov. In his foreword to that edition, Andy Soltis records that Smyslov called Bronstein's revelations “scandalous.”

◇Two books

Bronstein turned the tournament into literature. “I had no wish to become a variations-monger,” he wrote in the preface to the 1960 second edition; the author's ideas were to form the basis of the book, “with the moves played in each game serving to annotate them, as it were.” He asked readers to judge the players' mistakes gently, because “at the board there sits a living person, with all his everyday thoughts and worries, sometimes far removed from chess.” Jim Marfia's English translation was published by Dover in 1979. The archive here follows the game order of that book.

Najdorf, who shared sixth place, wrote his account in Spanish. It was published in two volumes in 1954 as 15 Aspirantes al Título Mundial, his first and only book, with a round-by-round story of the event, sketches of the players and notes to all 210 games. He called it “the greatest tournament of all time.” Taylor Kingston's English translation appeared in 2012, with an introduction by Yuri Averbakh, who had played in the tournament.