English Chess Forum

A little quiz question which I found in Rochade, an excellent German chess magazine. Only four players beat both Capablanca and Fischer. Can you name them. I would have got three but would have struggled with the fourth.

Keres, Reshevsky, Euwe .... and - the fourth PMed to John

How about Eliskases?

We have a winner

which player beat Adams and Blackburne? (presumably in a simul or friendly). It is still unbelievable, yet..

ARB Thomas.

Paul got there first with his PM to me shortly followed by Stephen Berry.

Eliskases is a much under rated player. He won the tournament at Noordwijk in 1938 a point clear of Keres followed by Pirc, Euwe, Bogoljubow, Landau, the perennial Sir George Thomas, Paul Schmidt, Spielmann and Tartakower. Not a bad line-up in which to score 7.5 out of 9.

John Moore wrote: Eliskases is a much under rated player...

Another of those, like Keres, whose peak years would probably have coincided with WW2. I'd forgotten Eliskases was viewed as a credible world championship challenger. Strange that neither he nor Najdorf got an invite to replace Fine when the latter withdrew from the 1948 Hague-Moscow World Championship tournament.

There is an interesting obit of Eliskases from New in Chess here.

AustinElliott wrote:

John Moore wrote: Eliskases is a much under rated player...

Another of those, like Keres, whose peak years would probably have coincided with WW2. I'd forgotten Eliskases was viewed as a credible world championship challenger. Strange that neither he nor Najdorf got an invite to replace Fine when the latter withdrew from the 1948 Hague-Moscow World Championship tournament.

There is an interesting obit of Eliskases from New in Chess here.

Miguel Najdorf would not have been keen on returning to Europe in 1948, having lost most of his family under the Nazis. Erich Eliskases would not have been welcome at that time, because he became the German Champion, after Austria was annexed by the Nazis. Both outstanding players, they were victims of WW11.

Maybe so, but my understanding has always been that Najdorf very much wanted to play in 1948, and was rather put out when the Soviets vetoed it.

As for Eliskases - as with a few of his ilk who emigrated to S America in the 1940s, he was not exactly a sworn enemy of the Nazi regime.......

Najdorf was highly placed at Groningen 1946, where he crushed Botvinnik in the final round.

Then he won first prizes at Prague 1946 and Barcelona 1946. All three tournaments were in Europe.

He also had an interview or article around that time where he confidently predicted he would be world champion.

The Botvinnik game is the generally accepted main reason why the USSR would not allow Najdorf to play as a replacement for Fine in the 1948 world championship, even though it would have avoided the bye every round as actually occurred with five players. Prague 1946 was originally announced as effectively a qualifier for the sixth player, but the Russians got round this by not accepting their invitations (even though the Moscow v Prague match was the same year) and then claiming that the field at Prague was too weak for it to be a qualifier.

Najdorf also played at the 1948 Saltsjobaden interzonal (from which he qualified to the 1950 Candidates) so the statement above that he didn't want to travel to Europe in 1948 is just nonsense.

The fact is that Najdorf deserved a place in the 1948 world championship and was badly treated by his exclusion.

Botvinnik would probably have been the fifth name on the list, if he had played Fischer more than once. A real shame their proposed 1970 match didn't come off.

Via the Chessreader blog http://chessreader.blogspot.co.uk/ here's a Ph.D. dissertation which will be of interest to posters on the Botvinnik/Keres controversy.

Storming Fortresses: A Political History Of Chess In The Soviet Union, 1917-1948

http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/0s71f0cw

I just read the section on Keres in the dissertation. It is brief and quite inadequate, given the amount of documentation which is available in published sources.

Was Liebknecht (see thesis, champter two, page 33) "strong enough to have considered a career as a chess professional" by any account other than his own?