Those thoughts were recorded immediately after the game, though not every player was as eloquent as these two, who were both heroes of mine.
Tony Miles was the first English grandmaster. Only a few years before he secured that title in 1976, the notion that anyone from this country could achieve the title had seemed fanciful. Bent Larsen had been the strongest Western player after Bobby Fischer throughout the 1960s. As happens with your youthful heroes, they are now both dead.
And this is a great game. Larsen gets what looks like a winning attack with his home-made opening, only for Miles to stay in the game thanks to a series of precise defensive moves. Miles then goes on to win with an idea straight out of a composed chess problem.
One of the best things about The Master Game was the way it showed grandmasters were human. In the West we had grown up believing they were superhumans who always saw 20 moves ahead, but both Larsen and Miles admit at various points here that they're not sure what is happening in the game. That made club players like me feel less inadequate.
And if the analyst Bill Hartston, who was briefly England's top chess player at the start of the Seventies, looks familiar, it's because he appeared on Gogglebox for many years.
2 comments:
Thanks for that, and a reminder of Jeremy James whose final years I see from a Guardian obituary "were spent near Yssingeaux in the Haute-Loire region of south-central France in a property shared with his friend Marie Dominique Colombet and a quirky menagerie of animals including ostriches, budgerigars and a fine pig".
It was a great game to watch. As good to watch as anything today.
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