Keene on Petrosian

Back in the early days of this blog, I wrote many posts on Petrosian's unique style; see, for example, Index to Petrosian's Exchange Sacrifice. After a more recent post, Controversial Keene, I continued to gather material written by Keene from Chessgames.com, and was pleased to find a list of recommended Petrosian games in the Raymond Keene forum (p.70).

Oct-08-04 ray keene: may i recommend the following games by petrosian. this is from memory so apologies if the references arent quite right - however they are all petrosian wins so you shd be able to track them down without too much difficulty.

I then located the same games on Chessgames.com:-

• Petrosian - Guimard; Gothenburg Interzonal (1955)
• Filip - Petrosian; Amsterdam Candidates (1956)
• Keres - Petrosian; Yugoslavia Candidates (1959)
• Petrosian - Fischer; Yugoslavia Candidates (1959)
• Petrosian - Tal; Curacao Candidates (1962)
• Petrosian - Korchnoi; Curacao Candidates (1962)
• Petrosian - Botvinnik; World Championship Match (1963, g.5)
• Petrosian - Botvinnik; World Championship Match (1963, g.7)
• Benko - Petrosian; First Piatigorsky Cup (1963; *)
• Filip - Petrosian; Yerevan (1965)
• Spassky - Petrosian; World Championship Match (1966, g.7)
• Petrosian - Spassky; World Championship Match (1966, g.10)
• Larsen - Petrosian; Havana Olympiad (1966)
• Spassky - Petrosian; World Championship Match (1969, g.11)
• Petrosian - Spassky; World Championship Match (1969, g.20)
• Petrosian - Korchnoi; Candidates Semifinal (1971)
• Petrosian - Fischer; Candidates Final (1971)
• Petrosian - Karpov; USSR Championship (1973)
• Kasparov - Petrosian; Tilburg (1981)
• Petrosian - Psakhis; Las Palmas Interzonal (1982)

Keene's list had 19 games, so to round it out I added the game marked '*' from the Petrosian chapter that he wrote for E.G. Winter's 'World Chess Champions' (Pergamon Press, 1981). Keene also wrote the Fischer chapter in the same book. Given the animosity often displayed by Winter for Keene, it is surprising to find they once collaborated on a project. Keene discussed this in Keres vs Alekhine, 1943, another forum on Chessgames.com.

Jul-14-04 ray keene: i contributed to a book on world champions which winter compiled but this was 24 years ago when he was in his early 20's. i had no idea of his identity then and he has always been very careful to conceal himself - no pictures for example. a foto of winter wd be worth quite a bit. in fact when he contacted me to contribute to the book i mixed him up with someone much older at the bbc whom i thought to be an amateur chess historian and to whom i had given a couple of chess lessons a few years earlier!!

we had perfectly cordial relations to start with - all by post - but when i co wrote batsford chess openings with kasparov he accused us in print of only having ghost written contributions - not the real gk. since i had been with garry in moscow when he wrote his bit out by hand this annoyed me more than somewhat as it struck at the very credibility of the book. i then hit on the idea of auctioning the original gk manuscript for charity and putting it on show in the batsford offices for inspection beforehand so the handwritng could be verified - which a number of experts did. winter never forgave me for proving him wrong - he attacked me left right and centre and i used to reply. then he wrote something complaining about an article i had written, alleging it was without foundation - but i found the source for the story in one of his own books.

For Winter's version of the BCO - Kasparov story, see 'Batsford Chess Openings', the first section in Cuttings [Chesshistory.com]. The page is a long summary of the Keene - Winter feud.

Keene wrote a later book on Petrosian, titled Petrosian Vs the Elite [amazon.co.uk]. The publication date (Batsford, 2006) suggests that it contains the same games listed by Keene on Chessgames.com.