Paul Keres

Power Chess: Great Grandmaster Battles from Russia Paul Keres

Paul Keres was one of the five or six strongest players in the world from 1935 when he emerged as a sensational 19-year-old at the 1935 World Chess Olympics in Warsaw until his untimely death by heart attack at the time of an international airplane flight from Vancouver to Helsinki in 1975. During most of his life, Keres was the number three player in the world. This unfortunate circumstance led to the top two players in the world playing repeated matches for the World Chess Championship, whereas Keres who was usually number three never got a shot at the World Championship. Keres was a native of Estonia. He was always an Estonian patriot, even though he had to keep quiet about it during the years of Soviet rule. His picture appears on both the money and the postage stamps of Estonia. This book consists of 22 articles by Keres published in Chess Life magazine during the years 1968-1975.