Word: botvinnik
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plotting (and attempting to execute) murderous campaigns of patricide, matricide, fratricide, regicide and mayhem." A great chess player, Manhattan's Reuben Fine, has popularized a psychology of chess studded with phallic symbols, spattered with anal-sadistic impulses and imbued with latent homosexuality. In successive rounds, Fine once defeated Botvinnik, Reshevsky, Euwe, Flohr and Alekhine, and drew with Capablanca. When Fine switched his major interest from chess to psychoanalysis, the result was a loss for chess-and a draw, at best, for psychoanalysis. Many psychologists, some Freudians included, now believe that the sexual symbolism in chess is vastly overdrawn...
Since 1948, all of the world champions have been Russians-from Mikhail Botvinnik (three times) to Boris Spassky. Their personalities, temperaments and styles of play reflect not only East-West cultural differences, but also the peculiar status of chess in Communist countries. While chess is merely a game for the Russian masses, it is a profession or at least a second profession for the Soviet chess masters, who may also be engineers or physicists. Both teaching and play are state-supported, and grand masters get good pay and high honors. So when a grand master competes outside Russia...
...make a move. During a match with World Champion Emanuel Lasker (1894-1921), Steinitz slurped a glass of lemonade so noisily that Lasker moved to a separate table. Some of Lasker's victims claimed in turn that the champion stunned them with his foul-smelling cigars. World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik( 1948-57,1958-60, 1961-63) used to train for a match by having an aide blow smoke in his eyes. Matched against the U.S.S.R.'s Mikhail Tal, a former world champion (1960-61) who has been accused of trying to hypnotize rivals with his laserlike gaze, U.S. Grand Master...
...went on to become the Soviet checkers champion.) During World War II, Spassky's parents were separated; he was evacuated from Leningrad and lived for a period in an orphanage in the Kirov Region. He learned the game when he was five. At ten, he played former World Champion Botvinnik in an exhibition match?and won. Said Botvinnik: "This boy will become world champion...
...Spassky was named an international grand master (the youngest ever until Fischer won that distinction), and in 1969 he proved Botvinnik a prophet