Mikhail Botvinnik

This article is an extract from the chess website bestofchess.com.... you can read the full article by clicking on the link below. He was born in St Petersburg, Russia around 1911. Chess became a hobby for him as early as the age of 12 and unlike all the chess champions who precede him, he never learnt the game at home. His was a humble beginning to which he lost his true identity but was lucky not to live a life of desolation given his true origin.

He was born Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik of both Jewish mum and father. At his time of birth, the Jew people were constrained to one region and were not allowed to live outside it (it was referred to as the Pale of Settlement). In these constrained camps, the Jews suffered a high poverty rate and life was tough every day. However for this young Jewish boy who masqueraded as a Russian national, his parents worked as dentist thus were allowed to live outside the Pale of Settlement. Young Mikhail grew up knowing he was a Jew by blood but a Russian by culture.

His mother was then to become ill and his father left them to marry a Russian woman. This to the young soon-to-be chess champion was too much that he resulted to reading newspapers to pass time and escape from the confusion around him. Through his reading he became a fully committed communist. It was in autumn season the year of 2013 that Mikhail Botvinnik was first introduced to chess in school by a boy who was a friend to his older brother.

The friend had designed a home-made chess board in which they played together until he grew an interest in the game all together. It was not long before he was competing in the school chess championships in which he finished at the mid-table. After this he began to look for chess advice all over, even among other friends of his brother until he drew a concrete blue print of how to beat the original friend who had introduced him to the game.

Victory surely came when in the winter of 1924, he beat everyone in the school chess championship and became the new grandmaster of chess. This would automatically have won him a place at the Petrograd Chess Assembly but he was still young of age. But he wanted that membership so badly that he lied his age by three years and he got in; thanks to the Assembly president who turned a blind eye to the deception.

Mikhail Botvinnik soon was playing tournaments at the assembly and he won his first two tournaments of chess. The Petrograd Chess Assembly was later to be dissolved and a Chess club was established by a chess extremist known as Nikolai Krylenko.  Nikolai was a member of the Soviet Legal System thus he had enough manpower and connections to make this happen and was even able to organize the first Moscow Chess Tournament of 1925. It is in this tournament that this young chess guru met the World Champion Jose Raul Capablanca. Indeed Capablanca was talented as he was rumored. But when he was put to face him in a match, he was astonished to beat Raul to the game. This was his ticket to join the Leningrad chess championship team and represent his country Russia.

He was picked to play at Stockholm where he faced Gosta Stoltz who was a rising chess master and was soon to make a name in the near future. After the Leningrad tournament, he was privileged to be one of the few chess players selected to do annotation reports about the entire Leningrad chess season.

When the chess season had cooled down, Mikhail Botvinnick decided to go to school. He joined one of the schools in Komsomol branch and also took up physical training routines because his body was looking a bit frail. He continued with the school program till he was done with curriculum though he was still young at age to join higher education.

Meanwhile he was selected to play at the USSR Championship where he was the youngest of all those contesting. He tied fifth place and was simultaneously crowned the National Master of Chess. Besides the thrill of winning in chess, he also had a burning desire for Electrical Technology which he enrolled to study at Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. This came after a struggle of getting a place in the school as only children of engineers or industrial workers were given first priority.

Before joining the polytechnic he first attended Leningrad University where he was posted to the Mathematics department. While at the university he joined the student chess team and won a championship in Moscow. This was his lucky stroke, the team manager of their campus chess team was in fact the Deputy Chairperson of the Prolestud; the body that was governing admissions to the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. He finally got his ticket to the school and was transferred to the Electromechanical Department.

1931 was a peak for Mikhail Botvinnik’s career when, at the age of 20, he won the Soviet Chess Champion scooping a clean 13 ½ out of a possible 17. He however acknowledged that he didn’t have a stiff competition since more of the revolutionary masters of chess were not present in that tournament. After this tournament he went on to graduate with a degree in Electrical Engineering from Langrad Polytechnic Institute. He stayed to pursue a candidate degree as he continued playing in tournaments until a big break came around 1938.

It was in 1938 that a world chess championship tournament dubbed AVRO was organized in Netherlands. The winner of this tournament was going to get a match with the then World Chess Champion Alexander Alekhine. But it seemed that Alekhine was more concerned with a player who could raise the match price that actually who won the match. For this reason this now-proclaimed Chess Champion from Russia decided to pursue other means of challenging Alekhine. Then again Alekhine seemed to have agreed to this match so that he could reconcile with his country and go back home.

The big break for Mikhail Botvinnik came in 1948 when he played at the World Chess Championship at The Hague, Moscow. He took the tournament by convincing the entire crowd with a score of 14 out of 20.