BOOK REVIEW: The Games of Tigran Petrosian 1942-1965

Okay, the weak part of the book is definitely the notes. Petrosian is far from being the world's greatest annotator: too by-the-book and Sovietish (a real Kotov clone). The other contributors aren't always too enlightening either (and are seldom if ever attributed in the text--which is another liability).

Still, the games themselves more than make up for all of this. I started out just thinking that I would play over the first few and lose interest...but I ended up going through the whole book. One interesting thing is that Tigran is not a whirlwind genius from the get-go; the earliest games are sometimes a bit bumbling, and so you really get this sense of a young player having to learn his chops rather than being blessed with some Capablancan vision from the outset.

What's most remarkable about him is his rapid progress once he became a master: he went from a borderline titleholder to one of the world's best in a few years (somewhat akin to Fine's own astonishing progress from 2100 player to winner of AVRO 1938 in a similarly restricted length of time).

The most surprising thing for me about this collection is the large number of marvelous attacking games he played--very beautiful attacks. Of course, you expect a slew of positional buildups from Petrosian (with every brick in place)--but who knew that he would resemble Bronstein (or even Tal) on many more than one occasion?

Fischer's remark early on (quoted in the text) certainly rang true and proved prescient: "If only Petrosian would play more boldly, he would be world champion."