Paul Keres

◇A boy and a thousand games copied by hand

Keres was born in Narva in 1916 and grew up in Pärnu, on the Estonian coast, the son of Peeter and Marie Keres. His father and older brother showed him the moves; the rest he taught himself, copying out by hand close to a thousand games from chess columns in newspapers because there were no books to be had. From that quiet apprenticeship grew one of the most natural attackers the game has known.

In Grandmaster of Chess: The Early Games of Paul Keres, he recalled a lesson from a 1929 city match against Ilmar Raud. Their first game was drawn; in the second Keres reached an ending two pawns ahead. Raud left a rook for him to take. Keres captured it immediately and was mated a few moves later. "These first hours of instruction were painful, but also very useful," he wrote.

Correspondence chess made him. He played by post on a scale almost unimaginable today — up to a hundred and fifty games at once, perhaps five hundred in all — and in 1935 he won the international championship of the IFSB. The endless analysis bred a player who saw combinations the way other men saw the squares of the board. While he was still a student of mathematics at the University of Tartu he began to win abroad as well.

◇AVRO 1938 — the next challenger

In 1938 the Dutch broadcaster AVRO gathered the eight strongest players in the world, Alekhine, Capablanca, Botvinnik, Euwe, Reshevsky, Fine, Flohr and the twenty-two-year-old Keres, and sent them around the Netherlands from 2 to 27 November to choose Alekhine's next challenger. Keres tied for first with Reuben Fine on 8½/14 and took first place on the Sonneborn–Berger tiebreak. He scored 1½–½ against Fine and beat Capablanca. The year before, he had won Semmering–Baden 1937, but both of his games there against Capablanca were drawn.

Keres's account of AVRO in The Early Games includes a missed chance to win outright. He adjourned his twelfth-round game against Alekhine two pawns ahead, considered it won, and did no further analysis. Alekhine's defence held the draw. Keres then drew with Capablanca and Fine, while Fine beat Alekhine, leaving the two leaders tied.

In My Great Predecessors, Part I, Garry Kasparov describes Keres requesting a meeting with Alekhine after AVRO and waiting in vain in the Carlton Hotel. Negotiations for a title match never produced one. In September 1939 Germany invaded Poland, the world that had built AVRO collapsed, and in June 1940 the Red Army marched into Estonia. The match that should have followed AVRO 1938 vanished into the war — and with it, almost certainly, Keres's clearest chance at the crown.

◇Through two occupations

What followed was the hardest stretch of any great player's life. Under the German occupation Keres was allowed, in fact required, to play in tournaments organized by the Nazi chess official Ehrhardt Post: Salzburg, Munich, Prague, Madrid, Posen, Tallinn. He won most of them and finished second to Alekhine in the others, sharing first with the world champion at Salzburg 1943 on 7½/10. It was in one of those wartime games, against Bogoljubow at Salzburg 1943, that he first played the sharp 6.g4 against the Sicilian Scheveningen that is now called the Keres Attack.

When the Soviets returned in 1944 the war's footprints on his career caught up with him. An autumn escape attempt failed; a 1942 newspaper interview was dragged back out as anti-Soviet evidence; he was interrogated, kept under suspicion, barred from leaving the Union, and held off the international circuit for years while contemporaries played on. Unlike his Latvian colleague Vladimirs Petrovs, who died in the Gulag, Keres survived — but only by absorbing the slow administrative violence of a regime that did not forget.

Then, at the 1948 match-tournament that finally chose a successor to the late Alekhine, Keres lost his first four games to Mikhail Botvinnik. He won the last. He finished joint third on 10½/20. Whispers have followed those games for the better part of a century, and no investigation has ever proven them: the historian Taylor Kingston, after going through the surviving Soviet correspondence, concluded that the authorities had given Keres "strong hints" not to hinder Botvinnik but that Keres almost certainly did not throw the games on the board. The truth, as so often with Keres, is somewhere in the shadow the Soviet century left over chess.

◇The Eternal Second

From 1953 to 1962 Keres finished second in four straight Candidates Tournaments, the qualifying events for the world title. Zurich 1953: joint second with Bronstein and Reshevsky behind Smyslov. Amsterdam 1956: second behind Smyslov. Bled–Zagreb–Belgrade 1959: second behind Tal. Curaçao 1962: tied second with Geller, half a point behind Petrosian, in the tournament whose Soviet collusion Bobby Fischer famously denounced. In 1965, when the cycle switched to knockout matches, he lost his quarterfinal to Spassky 4–6. That early elimination was separate from his four runner-up finishes, which Kasparov records in My Great Predecessors, Part II.

His nicknames included "Paul the Second", "The Crown Prince of Chess" and "The Eternal Second". "Paul the Second" was already in use in 1937, Kasparov notes in My Great Predecessors, Part IV: the young attacker's style was being compared with Paul Morphy. He was one of only three players in history (with Korchnoi and Beliavsky) to defeat nine undisputed world champions. He won the Soviet Championship three times (1947, 1950, 1951); he was Estonian champion four times. He beat Alekhine, Capablanca, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Fischer and Euwe across the board over a span of nearly forty years.

His chapter on defence in The Art of the Middle Game, written with Alexander Kotov, examines his escape against David Bronstein at Amsterdam 1956. Keres admitted that his position was objectively lost, but kept setting practical problems. Bronstein spent thirty-five minutes choosing his sealed move; after the resumption he had only ten minutes for fourteen moves. Mistakes reversed the position, and Bronstein lost on time after his fifty-third move. Keres used the game to explain why resistance could still matter in a position that ought to be lost.

◇The teacher and the team man

If his individual record was tragic, his team record was magnificent. Across eleven Olympiads — first for Estonia, then for the USSR — he scored +97 −13 =51 in 161 games, a 76.1 per cent share that ranks among the highest in the event's history. From 1952 to 1964 the Soviet team won the gold medal at seven Olympiads in a row with Keres on its boards, and from 1954 to 1960 he took four consecutive individual board golds, a streak no one else has matched. At the European Team Championships of 1957, 1961 and 1970 he again won team and individual gold each time, scoring 14/18.

He also wrote a great deal. His books include the standard English-language collection Grandmaster of Chess (his own best games annotated by himself), Practical Chess Endings, still in use today, and, with Alexander Kotov, The Art of the Middle Game. He contributed Volume C of the Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings in 1974 and left behind 180 composed problems and 30 studies. Kasparov records that Keres's magazine Estonian Chess (1936–40) was closed after Estonia's annexation by the Soviet Union. His opening ideas, the Keres Attack against the Scheveningen, the Keres Defense (1.d4 e6 2.c4 Bb4+), a Closed Ruy Lopez line and an English system, were played for the next fifty years.

In his chapter of How to Open a Chess Game (1974) Keres described preparing that Ruy Lopez line, 11...Nd7 in the Chigorin Defence, for the 1962 Candidates' Tournament in Curaçao: "I had been a long-time follower of this defense and wished to remain faithful to it in this tournament." He played it in his four games with Black against Tal and Fischer and won three. In the one loss Fischer chose an early exchange in the centre that Keres had looked at and set aside, and Keres called his neglect of it "irresponsible". He also admitted that in three of the four games, "after a few moves I faced the same problem as my opponents and did not know what to play next."

◇Vancouver, and home

In the spring of 1975, at fifty-nine, Keres flew to Vancouver to play one last tournament. He won it. On the long journey back he died of a heart attack during the stopover in Helsinki on June 5, 1975. He was brought home to Tallinn, where about a hundred thousand people followed the funeral procession through the streets and Max Euwe, the president of FIDE, walked beside the coffin. He was buried in Metsakalmistu cemetery.

Estonia has kept his memory carefully. From 1992 to 2011 the Estonian 5-kroon banknote carried his portrait. A Soviet commemorative stamp followed in 1991. There are statues of him in Tõnismägi park in Tallinn and in Narva, where one went up on his hundredth birthday in 2016. Streets in Nõmme, Narva and Pärnu carry his name. In 2000 Estonia voted him Sportsman of the Century; FIDE made 2016 the Year of Paul Keres. The Paul Keres Memorial Tournament, held in Tallinn since 1969, is the longest-running tournament of its kind dedicated to a single player, and Keres himself won the 1971 and 1975 editions, the last only weeks before he died.