World Champion Vasily Smyslov, 1921-2010

After a long life former world champion Vasily Smyslov passed away today. World chess champion from 1957 to 1958, he was known for his strong and natural style of chess play, with excellent endgame technique and an interest in creating his own compositions.

"The content of a game should be a search for truth, and victory a demonstration of its rightness"

I had seen several of his games in watching lessons at the Polgar Chess University, where he was usually shown displaying strikingly imaginative play. He was near blind in his final ten years but still managed to follow games by hearing the moves read aloud, and was doubtless a strong blindfold player. An example of one of his favourite games can be found here.

I played a semi-blindfold game (with only pawns visible) against an established 1443 on ICC today. Thanks to some slightly weak opening moves by my opponent I managed to direct the game into a somewhat better endgame, which I managed to convert reasonably smoothly. I'm really quite surprised that I have achieved the recent results that I have, seeing as I have only been practicing blindfold a little under two weeks. With that said, I again managed to forget a piece, and when you do that it's only luck if you don't lose because of it.

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Not the most complicated game, but quite satisfying. See annotations in the game viewer for specific comments.