The Great Man Moves On

Dr. X posts this from the Chess Palace in Long Beach:

"David Ionovich Bronstein, February 19, 1924, Bila Tserkva, Ukraine – December 5, 2006, Minsk, Belarus.

"It saddened me perhaps more than it should have to hear of the passing of the great Bronstein, whose ill-starred championship match was discussed in our blog's third post. He was an old man, and, unlike most Russian men of his generation, he died of natural causes. He found a happy marriage late in life, and won the genuine affection of millions of chess fans. His death should not be a sad event. It is not an affront to the natural order, it affirms it.

"But my sense of loss is so deep. Bronstein epitomized for me what a sportsman should be - what a man should be. His commitment to his art was no less than Beethoven's or Picasso's. And he carried his skill lightly. In his later years he would honor his opponent or the tournament organizer by playing their favorite opening, perhaps introducing an innovation or two. There is a fine obituary over at Chessbase - at the bottom there is a clip where Yasser Seirawan, the American grandmaster, tells a story exemplifying what a powerful and unique creature Bronstein was.

"On tournament results alone, Bronstein was not the greatest player who ever lived. Depending on how long a time period you measure over (this site has a pretty good system), he was one of the top 15 (average rating over 20 years) or 25 ( over 4 years) players who ever lived.

"But you can't judge Bronstein only by his rating. You see, he didn't always play to win, exactly. He was experimental. He viewed himself as a chess artist - an ugly victory was, for him, worse than no victory. When he played Samuel Reshevsky (the best American player before Fischer) in the 1953 Zurich Candidates' Tournament, the Russian coaches begged him to take the games seriously and try to win. He did, and did.

"The upside of this artistic temperament meant that, on a given day, he could play a game that would be remembered forever.

• "There is a guy named Ljubomir Ljubojević - he's good, he was a contender for the world championship for a time in the early 80s, and he's beaten everyone at one time or another, including Karpov and Kasparov. But he is immortal because of a game he lost to Bronstein, in which Bronstein threw most of his pieces away, marched his King into the center of the board, and forced his resignation.
• "There was this guy named Tal, who when he was young, took down Botvinnik for a while and became world champion based on pure combinatorial power. He was a human computer, able to calculate variations far beyond the grasp of most other grandmasters. He and Bronstein would get into it pretty good, as seen in this train wreck of a game, from the 1968 Russian Team Championships.
• "Speaking of computers, Bronstein killed them. He was one of the first grandmasters to play against them, and, as Kavalek explains in the Washington Post, 'somehow, Bronstein seemed able to confuse the machines.' Here he whips MacChess in an Ilyin-Genevsky Dutch. Of these battles Bronstein said 'I truly believed that the human brain is more powerful than any electronic monster. And I did not change my mind even after playing computers for eight years.'

"Here is a story of a talk Bronstein gave at the Chess Palace in Long Beach long ago. It is full of lessons, the greatest of which is: play for joy. Reflecting on his career, I am reminded of the passage from the Tao Te Ching:

"The best athlete
"wants his opponent at his best.
"The best general
"enters the mind of his enemy.
"The best businessman
"serves the communal good.
"The best leader
"follows the will of the people.

"All of them embody
"the virtue of non-competition.
"Not that they don't love to compete,
"but they do it in the spirit of play.
"In this they are like children
"and in harmony with the World.

"He even got an obituary in the New York Times. Not bad for a kid who started his career long ago, doing railroad work, in a little town called Stalingrad."