Great Player of the Past: GM Samuel Reshevsky

[Music] hey everybody this is grandmaster ben feingold here at the chess club and scholastic center of atlanta uh-huh and this is our weekly wednesday night lecture we've had a couple of weeks off because of the u.s championship and or u.s women's championship we're also going to have next week off because karen and i will be in an airplane so i can't i can't do this class from an airplane then the next week we'll be back um this was uh this lecture topic is samuel rushevsky most of you have heard of him uh and the reason you've heard of um is he was a world-class player for 50 years that's pretty good yeah and this is a sponsored lecture sponsored by what whatever name it was i forgot what was that name karen exactly yeah we need to find the sponsor's name so we can wilson oh she looked like she didn't know but then she was listening yeah typical lecture that i give nobody listens jay wilson is the sponsor and we were reaching out for sponsors and most people you know don't necessarily have enough money to sponsor so one of the famous people we reached out to we knew they had enough money was tom hanks and he said he didn't want cert he'd want to sponsor a lecture but he knew somebody who did and we're like who and he said wilson and it turned out he was right we looked at all the wilson's in the world and we found jay wilson so thank you mr wilson for uh sponsoring our lecture on reshefsky now i have a personal connection to rashevsky i actually have several uh i'll tell you two funny stories and then you can decide which one's funnier um then i have other stories that aren't related to me necessarily but to my dad so roshewski was giving a simul at a very very very large building in the detroit called the renaissance center and it used to be a hotel um and had other stuff and and gm bought it and i don't know if they still own it but i think they do so it's a gm building now but that's good i can go there whenever i want because i'm a gm um and he gave us simul there and there was a guy that i knew who was about 2 000 and i was probably 20 200 2 300. so i was helping him and he beat rashevsky yay because you know we were cheating the other funny story is rushevsky used to live in michigan because he went to school there at some point he actually went to school in like three different states he considered himself not a professional chess player but an accountant anyway so this was way way way way way before i was born he was out on a date with a woman and they went back to her place and they were outside and rashefsky was singing he must have written the book sing like a grandmaster and she said you can't sing people are sleeping and he said i'm rushevsky raar which is the right answer and then she said get out of here and that was it now the reason i told you that story is that woman later married a chess player who's also a doctor his name was howard gaba gaba was about 1900 at chess i've played him he's from michigan and he was the doctor that delivered me even though he wasn't an ob gyn so that explains you know a lot of stuff about that um and yeah my family knew his him for ten thousand years at least when i was a little kid he was really old and he died when i was an adult so he was really really old not reshefsky although yeah but this guy howard gaba and there's a big tournament every year in detroit called the motor city open and it's always during thanksgiving weekend and howard gaba the guy who delivered me who married the woman who went on one date with hershevsky he started it he was the organizer sponsor director et cetera okay rushevsky was born in poland as it says on your screen with a polish name since nobody could pronounce his name he changed it to samuel rushevsky which people also can't pronounce now some people get confused and by some i mean about half of you there's another chess player who's known as an author and writer more than a chess player named shirazewski it's rashevsky with the letters s-h-e before it shurachewski he's probably like i am strength and he's written a lot of books but that's different than this rashewski who was class now the reason rushevsky is famous isn't just because he is good the reason he's famous is he was really good for a long time right now you take a spar of now and probably like grand master gus could beat him right but ruschevsky was good between 1920 and 1975. most people aren't good for that long in fact in the 70s uh he played in like the chess olympiad for the us team which he also did in the 30s 40s 50s 60s etc so he was i would say top 10 in the world for over 30 years and probably top 100 in the world for 50 years okay like most people except for one thing he is an eight-time u.s championship winner he tied for second in the 53 zurich tournament many of you have that book in 1948 there was no world champion alekhine died in 1946 and people furrowed their brows in a vain attempt to understand who the world champions was so they had a quintuple round robin confusing the audience with five players and the math involved to figure out how many rounds that is what confound even the the sturdiest mit student so no tournaments have five players and no tournaments are quintiple round robins it's never happened but they wanted to find a world champion and they wanted him to earn it so there were 20 rounds for the for each person and then each person had lots of buys because four people would play then one has a buy so each person played 20 games but there were more than 20 rounds which you know for obvious reasons anyway the winner of that tournament was bot vinnick that's how botvavic became the world champion second place was was smith's love and roshewski tied for third half a point behind smithslav and max irva who is world champion before and after alekhine uh came in last by a lot and rashevsky tied with uh paul karas there's controversy on that tournament a lot of people think care is lost on purpose to botvenic because stalin said so and wesley so wasn't alive then so that's ridiculous okay roshawski was born in 1911 he died in 1992 at the age of and he was always playing chess except for a brief period um in the late 20s i think early 30s where he was just in university and getting degrees he got mad ivy degrees so yeah uh born in poland and then moved to the u.s and there's three great pictures of rashevsky on his wikipedia which i'll show you now now first of all can you see this big picture because i clicked on something so i'm not sure if i'm sharing it anybody somebody could say yes or no thank you so that's rashevsky he's eight years old and he's giving a simon in france because i think in 1920 he still was in poland he didn't move to the us yet and these people all went to old school that's the school they went to this guy's choking on his own rage over here okay and rushefsky won every game okay next this is rashevsky with your two favorite people douglas fairbanks have you heard who you haven't heard of and charlie chaplin who you have heard of and rushevsky was uh i guess that was a year later so he was either nine or ten at the time um this is on the set of the three musketeers i guess he was the third one okay and then there's this picture of rashevsky playing at a chess club and there's a lot of people watching everybody they didn't watch on their phones like we do now i don't know why so yeah rushevsky wasn't as bad as he played he was known as the child prodigy now the problem is this lecture is not 10 hours long so i can't show you all of rushevsky's greatest games um reshefsky of the first 12 world champions played 11 of them i don't think he played steinitz because i don't think steins was alive when roshewski was born but he might have been but he wasn't playing chess and he did play lasker when lasker was old then he played all of them so rashevsky played every world champion except for steinitz because you know being alive helps and he met kasparov and spoke to him but they never played a tournament game because rachelski really wasn't playing then and of the 11 world champions he played he beat seven of them okay just like you guys at home all right now rushevsky may have been the world champion at some point if he didn't take several years off of school off of chess and go to school or if he considered himself a chess player he's like i'm an accountant very similar to morphe who said he wasn't a chess player he was a lawyer but the difference is morphe really quit chess sammy played chess all the time but he you know he didn't consider himself a chess player so he played on the us olympic team six times on board one over 37 years frankly ridiculous and he won a bronze in 1974 when he was 63 what um so pretty good and he played 100 games in the olympiads just like most of you from the 30s to the 70s he didn't play after that because in 80s he was down with the ladies no i'm just kidding he was not alive so much okay he and bobby fischer hated each other um a lot of people hated reshefsky um ann fisher because rushevsky was known for sharp practices like offering a draw and then denying he offered a draw yeah um and he did that more than once uh rushevsky wrote several books and he had several matches with very strong players including he played a match with fisher and they both had two wins and there were seven draws it was a 16 game match then the next game uh fisher didn't show up he said this is wrong and that's wrong so the match ended and they didn't finish it it was a tied match but they declared rushevsky the winner because fisher stopped showing up um you know he was complaining about this and that and the other thing um he beat smithslav in 1991 and then he died in 1992. i guess that was the last world champion he can beat anyway i recommend those of you at home watching on youtube to go to rashevski's wikipedia page because there's a lot of information i mean and this is the books that he wrote here and so forth um these are his famous games again i can't i can't look at all of his games because it would be a 10 hour lecture so i just did the best i could not too good but a little bit good one time my dad and a friend of his approached rashevsky because they wanted an autograph or something and right before he they got to this he said what do you guys want so he was furious so he was always mad making him a great player something all right uh we're screen sharing hopefully okay now this is funny because arnold denker was also old when i i've seen roshewski and denker that's how old i am most of you weren't born when rashevsky and denker died so you're like what but but i i was alive and i've met denker several times some of you may know just a second they don't know every year there's a tournament called the arnold denker tournament of high school champions it's the best player in high school in every state they can send one player and they have it at the same site as the us open during the u.s open okay i played in the first denker in 1985 and i came in third and you know who was at the tournament denker he was alive which yeah and sammy rushevsky was not alive then because he died in 82. okay so this is rishevsky denker in 1934 when they're at the top of their game all right now let me get rid of the notation so you don't cheat too much just a little cheat a little but not too much okay so rashevsky is white against denker and denker played the budapest and the reason i'm showing this game is yesterday karen said i hate facing the budapest that she started crying it was it was a terrible scene okay aunt reshefsky played a move here that's very unusual roshesky liked to put pressure on his opponents he didn't want to be a pawn up in defending he wanted to be the one who was you know putting the pressure so instead of playing bishop f4 or knight f3 which are the two main moves like i guess they're not the two main moves okay he played e4 well i thought he played e4 yeah okay and this attacks the knight thusly but it lets black take back this pawn so he played d6 defending his knight bishop e2 attacking the knight and rashevsky's the one who's playing aggressively he literally doesn't care if he's a pawn up or not he just wants to show force and black is losing a lot of time by moving his knight every move okay and he moved it back here confusing like 95 of you on youtube okay but only 50 of you who are watching live you guys are better i guess notice the queen and the bishop attacked the knight twice it's defended once but it's also indirectly defended can someone in this vast audience tell me which other black piece is defending this night indirectly i i meant the audio the live audience but yeah you're right uh gus said the queen because we have queen h4 check so if you take my knight queen check wins the piece back and then white doesn't have zattoo bishops so roshavsky just played knight f3 and black's position was pretty passive bishop d7 not a move i would ever consider okay so you can see black's white has a lot of space in the center and the king's side and so on mainly and so on okay and since white castled and black didn't castle attack okay and that knight has a lot of squares except for one thing okay so he went back to g8 never going back bishop e3 never play f6 now if i was black in this position i'd probably play bishop c5 check if i was going to play knight g8 so my knight would have e7 i mean i wouldn't want to play knight g8 because that looks terrible but if i was going to play knight g8 i would check first that way my knight has a square so i don't like the way denker's playing f6 obviously i don't like the black king is on ea terrible okay bishop d3 here comes the attack black wins a pawn and now this is the best part of the game because roshewski plays knight g5 the reason it's the best part of the game is because he did danker's trick on denker yeah karen's like what yeah who would play knight here with black defended by queen h4 and then a few moves later white plays knight g5 defended by queen h5 frankly amazing so now if you guys ever play in tournaments that's something you know five four three two one okay now you forgot but you knew it for five seconds okay if you're watching on youtube just watch this part of the video over and over and over then it'll be like five seconds okay so he played knight f6 stopping queen h5 check and and rashefsky who knew that my streams eventually would end up on the internet always sacrificed the exchange rashevsky's like i want to play queen h5 check and obviously if you're the kind of person who doesn't calculate 20 moves ahead and you're like well this isn't fair he can calculate 20 moves ahead and i can't so how am i supposed to sack the exchange there's two reasons one is always sack the exchange easy the other is black hasn't castled yet and we're trying to attack and this game was was turned totally upside down okay and the reason it's turned totally upside down black sacrificed to pawn on move two and was trying to get active play white immediately gave the pawn back and then sacrificed his own pawn and now he's the one attacking he showed that guy okay and so now by sacking the exchange queen h5 check is unstoppable and he played g6 because king e7 hangs mating one the maiden one you don't see you don't see it okay everybody in the internet is like that's mate or that's me and neither one of them is made but bishop c5 that is me and king f8 obviously hangs this checkmate so g6 is forced takes takes takes and one of those mates is gonna happen king f8 queen f7 mate or king e7 main and denker was one of the top 10 players in the us for like 25 years and he got beat very very very badly because he played two passively he moved his king knight a thousand times and it ended up on g8 why was his night on jeet after moving it four times and as a consequence rushevsky said well you moved your knight a thousand times your king's on e8 you can't castle time to attack and that's what he did so a very brutal game from rushevsky and if i remember correctly which i don't that game was played in 1934. okay now the most important question ever do you see the new board popping up with white playing d4 excellent answer now maybe you haven't heard of denker maybe you haven't heard of rashevsky maybe you haven't heard of me maybe you haven't heard of karen obviously you've heard of grand master gus but for sure you've heard of emmanuel alaska our second world champion and i did a great players of the past on him a few weeks ago okay emmanuel alaska is white and he's playing uh whoa i did good i'm the best ah that didn't help why can't i just move this over come on stop it all right all computers are banned for my streams this was played in 1936 hopefully you can still see the port um uh rushevski was black against emmanuel alaska now i did a lot of research on the internet that's why i'm not vaccinated no way i'm vaccinated i did a lot of research on the internet and the internet was arguing about rashevsky and lasker was this edward lasker was it emmanuel asker and nobody knew so i'll ask her and i got the answer this is the only game emmanuel laster played rashevsky and it was in 1936 laster was barely alive but still alive and rashevsky was pretty good in 36. so he got the beat down and the smackdown and let's do a flip the board roshewski was black now don't blink and don't walk away to throw something out because this game's almost over and it's move one all right and i'll give lasker a break because you know lasker was in his in his 60s here at least okay so it was a boring qga this is the game that dominguez learned how to play black knight c3 a6 boring all right and i've probably had white in this position i even have black in this position it looks sort of like a modern kind of game all right and finally something happened knight e5 but this game could be played today at a gm level these are very reasonable moves and black's pretty comfortable black got all of his pieces out white never got d5 in white's not mating black so in the long run if the game goes to the end game you would assume this pawn is going to be weak in the opening and middle game white tries to attack using this pawn to play knight e5 hard to play knight e4 for black because there's no pawn defending it so white's playing aggressively and then black played knight to d5 confusing the audience now these bishops are attacking each other if this bishop leaves the board you could imagine knight f4 being good which attacks everything and with the with the knight not on not on f6 stop that with the knight nine on f6 you could imagine queen h5 queen h7 made his coming so knight d5 is a pretty daring move okay rushevsky must have been slightly surprised when lasker played bishop c1 but not only did rashevsky know the rules of my stream somehow so did lasker man those guys were great and lasker knew always retreat and the obvious reason is wants to stop knight f4 and white wants to keep pieces on the board because he has an isolated queen pawn standard practice doesn't want to trade everything and go into a worse ending the dish is better on c1 than these three squares this square it's hanging this square blocks the rook and this square blocks the queen bishop c1 doesn't block anything so we're still you know we could play bishop here bishop bishop h7 rick rick checkmate you can dream about anyway okay so he traded the more you trade the less white can win knight f6 a4 very strategical move white has an isolated a pawn and he wants to mess up black's pawns makes perfect sense queen d5 threatening mate and lasker was pretty elderly during this game so he just didn't see the main no i'm just kidding they would have taken away his world championship if he didn't see the mate um so he played knight f3 which is a quite a bad move yeah he should have played anything but knight f3 even my favorite move f3 that knight's pretty good on e5 now white has nothing you can't play knight e5 knight f3 that's not how you win in chess rook c8 threatening the c pawn defending the c pawn but giving up this diagonal so that's not a good move knight e4 and obviously if white trades everything and goes into the ending he has this terrible backward pawn and black has the two bishops so white would be groveling for a draw and lasker's not groveling lasker was groveling before you were born he's like that's enough groveling so he played rook c1 defending his pawn boo boo so bishop b2 too defensive knight f32 defensive rook c12 defensive right you got it you got to get active play you can't start active play with knight e5 and then just move backwards every move what does he mean rasheski played knight g5 obviously if you take the knight queen g2 is mate but there's no way to defend the knight so yeah good luck um i mean i guess he could play knight e1 and then after knight here check you can't take because of mate but you know you could play king h1 i guess not the position i was aiming for for wyatt but he went back too much so he just took on b5 and after taking back he made a terrible blunder terrible blunder and this is actually something i would teach like an intermediate class if you were rated like 1300 to 1700 this is perfect you wouldn't think laster needs this lesson okay terrible okay but lasker did have a serious case of old so he played bishop b5 horrible okay now the queen defends the bishop and it defends the knight this is like when i did u.s championship coverage and then i streamed after that the queen is overworked okay that's why queen elizabeth isn't going where she's supposed to she's gonna stay home and rest truth hurts okay and that's just a terrible blunder terrible blunder night takes you can't take with a queen which you would have the last three moves um because your bishop's hanging so you have to take with the pawn and don't take with the pawn but you know you gotta do something so bishop b5 is like an error i would expect from somebody under 1800 i mean just terrible blunder gf queen g5 check and laster resigned a very quick loss for lasker but this wasn't in his prime this was 30 years after his prime the only legal move is king h1 and now many many many many moves win uh queen here queen here and queen here they all win the same way queen here threatens bishop f3 and if you can stop bishop f3 you're a better player than i am and lasker and if you play to f5 or h5 with the same idea and white plays king g2 the only way to defend then queen g4 check okay so after queen g5 check last year's like oh it's very strange mistake for somebody that good so i mean he just got rolled off the board with white by reshefsky who was pretty good that's why i'm doing a lecture about him i mean roshewski beats seven world champions so he's not as bad as i play all right next game and what year was that 36. this was in the u.s open in 1944 and i've never heard of his opponent arnando vasconcelos and if you're like why haven't you heard of his opponent well you watch the game then you'll see why you'll be like oh that's why you never heard of him okay but i really like this game because roshewski showed who the boss was and since bruce springsteen wasn't born yet it was him 1944. that sounds like about when bruce springsteen was we probably bought in like 1950. all right so they played a french and rashevsky thought he was karissa yip it was very strange times back then he played very much in carissa yep style and you see how carissa iv did in the women's championship eight and a half out of 11. good good so he played the advance then he played very strange always trying to sack upon an attack like carissa yep so he took on c5 a move that's not played anymore and he's like i want to attack it's very strange to play knight d7 then take with the bishop probably take with the bishop first if you're gonna take with the bishop okay knight c6 bishop f4 defending the pawn queen c7 sort of attacking the pawn but i wouldn't take that because get into a pin a6 stopping knight b5 i agree rookie one is sort of normal french kind of position karen's probably had black here like 80 times yeah karen's nodding yeah okay queen b6 with the double threat not that this is a big threat because that's risky that's a pretty big threat bishop g3 defending the pawn if you're going to play queen b6 you might as well take on b2 otherwise why'd you play queen b6 knight takes d5 you will know rushevsky's name is the lord when you see this game probably black was counting on knight a4 that he moved his queen defend his bishop and so on and rusheski said hmm you know it's things that make you go hmm these pieces haven't moved yet this piece moved twice this piece moved twice this piece moved three times and i'm all ready to go i castle got my pieces out i got everything i want to get that black king so sack a piece open that white king up or a black king okay rook b1 and then e6 so rook's on the open file rook's on the open file big threat bishops are great knight's great and queen on a3 frankly ridiculous terrible okay well we don't want to allow pawn takes knight on d7 so knight f6 double check then bishop h4 he wants to get rid of the knight defending on f6 that's like the only piece near the black king knight b4 terrible i mean you got to get your kings safe you can't move a piece away from your king horrible knight e5 check notice the knight here was defending e5 and he moved it away that's why we never heard of the guy with black king f8 bishop takes f6 knight takes d3 now black is trying to trade pieces because this bishop's sort of annoying and white wants to play queen h5 and queen f7 main these pieces aren't really good defenders of the king so blacks like i'll trade everything bishop g7 check rook takes b7 shack that's the karen already shouted the move out before i played it okay i like the way he played rook b1 which seemed like it did nothing and then he then you see what it did so the bishop on c8 is stopping quinji for check but not if you take this this is another example of overworked roshewski wants to play queen g4 and give me but the bishop is stopping him so rook b7 check and this is a real sophie's choice um i'm sure rashevsky would approve of of you know that uh metaphor except for one thing okay um i'll wait for you to look up what sophie's choice is what's that it was also 1944 right that's it's funny for a lot of reasons yeah rashford's jewish yeah it's you can't have a funnier joke than that okay so he played bishop e7 but we can analyze bishop takes analysis done man that was long analysis did you like that analysis okay so we got three legal moves okay king here checkmate i'm not even using the engine that's how easy this is for me that's when you know it's easy okay if king fa i check on the f file you can't play king here because of mate and this gets mated by you know i do a sneak attack there okay and if you run away with your king so you play king e7 then i check and irrespective and since it's 2021 irregardless of whether you go here or here queen d7 is made good thing that rook's defending the knight okay so he can't take the rook but you can't leave the rook there to checkmate you say play bishop e7 sort of thwarts the rook queen h5 here comes you know here comes queen f7 rick f8 queen g5 if only archer was here notice the bishop is pinned yeah and now morphy's given the thumbs up from his grave because white's using all of his pieces to attack good good okay king h8 is the only legal move knight g6 check relentless frankly amazing takes check check rookie seven now if you play the other rook to e7 which looks more dominating queen c1 so he played this rook to e7 threatening queen g7 mate queen h7 mate rick h7 mate and black stopped all three what did he do karen yeah yeah notice these pieces didn't move very much that looks like a game that was played in the 1800s where morphe was white but that was rushevsky in 1944. rashevsky was known as a tedious strategic player but yeah there he said all his pieces have made it his opponent that is very similar to the way karissa yip plays now this is like every game carissiap was white in the french in the us women's they all finished like that yeah just attack attack attack and the opponent says damn stop attacking me yeah karen said that on our fourth date okay you know we were playing chess all right last but not least i wanted to show you a game where he beat a world champion um i already showed you alaska this is where he beat somebody who became the world champion during the tournament and there was no world champion this is the aforementioned botvanic and this this game rushevsky was black and this is the game this is the only game where chefsky beat botvenic in this event baffinick won the event and therefore was world champion in 1948. and rashefsky was half a point behind smithslav who came in second pretty good and beating the best player in the world probably you could argue cairos or smithslav were better but the tournament didn't bear that out with black in the world championship tournament that's a pretty good achievement this was played in 1948 at the world championship event and in my opinion if you want to study these kinds of nimzo indians because this is a kind which ted baxter didn't know what a kind was mary tyler moore joke um this is like like the number one game you should study from the black side okay because back in the day people played a3 pretty early which they're doing now too and you get these situations where white's trying to checkmate black and black is trying to win all these pawns because they're all weak and when white wins that teaches you how to checkmate and when black wins it teaches you how to defend get the pieces on the right squares and play the right strategy for grand masters now this is pretty easy because we have games like this to look at so we just look at these games okay i'll play like that so watch how rashevsky plays with black very instructive he plays b6 not to fianco as bishop but he and knight eight is also key because you don't want e5 to come with tempo and you want to be able to move both of these pawns and the guy doesn't know which one okay d6 knight a5 attacking the c pawn and bishop a6 attacking the c pawn again that's why you play b6 and this idea of knight here bishop here rook here is very standard but in 1948 you know it wasn't as standard but people were playing this more than they do now in the 30s and 40s excuse me maybe because of frederick samish it was all the same issue and after dozens and dozens of games of black being okay other variations became more popular than this one so for for white okay so queen e2 queen d7 the queen's going to a4 we're going to win that c pawn and trade some pieces white gives checkmate now reshesky could go here or here win this pawn but f5 is annoying i mean the guy's coming to get you so rishevsky's like all right f5 you ain't coming to get nobody and once i defend my king then i'll take all your pawns on the queen side and bob venice said no talking that's a lot to say in a tournament game okay you put more pieces on the king's side g6 defending f5 again and if i want to defend it again i can play knight g7 so if you can't move your f pawn white wants to move his f pawn get this bishop into the game open the center but rashevsky's no i'm blocking it up you'll never attack me and then i win easily on the queen's side queen a4 take all your pawns so he didn't rick d1 try to open it up there and then queen f7 he decided let's keep the queen near the king i don't have to play queen a4 i could just play rook c8 later but the only thing that matters is white gets no attack if white gets no attack these pawns are permanently bad and these three minor pieces they look pretty bad they can't move forward ever so very good defensive play from rashevsky and it was 1948 so soon thereafter but trojan's like defending that looks like a good idea e5 breaking on through to the other side giving jim morrison some ideas rook ca time to win that c pawn there's a lot of nimzo indians in this variation where the black pawn doesn't move to d6 and this pawn doesn't move to e5 and black plays knight d6 attacking this pawn obviously that can't happen here rookie one d e and he played d e um i mean it's again it's a sophie's choice i don't want to go here because i don't want to let f4 happen ever that seems quite annoying and also uh there's i could take this pawn and this pawn is gonna gonna fall now i now you can take the pawn so this pawn is safer so worst pawn structure ever but at least black won't take them for free at least knight g7 knight f1 maybe he'll play g4 yeah and then i mean white just has no attack on the king's side and white has this super ridiculous pawn structure on the queen side 93 yeah and everything's gonna fall okay now later in the game bhavanik made a really bad blunder because the whole game he's been worse with white but i'll get to the blunder because he's been defending and defending and defending and defending and then he cracked and usually bhavanik doesn't do something like that while defending g4 is an excellent move because he has no hope so he wants some hope he's like if you take with the f pawn i'll take this if you take with the h pawn here comes my rook cerashevsky's like whatever just doubles rooks on the d file okay and now we gotta watch it here i mean i've never seen somebody attack everything if you showed me this game and we got to this point and i didn't know the game that you said well this is botvinnik it's 99 percent baffinix black there's a plot on f5 better pawn structure strategical masterpiece this is this is how boffinik played his whole career was the way black played rook d1 h4 and white is in wang chung h4 is a genius move because white can't move now and bothwick made a double question mark move in time trouble when you're like white can't move you're like what do you mean why can't white move well he did move then you're going to find out why his move was bad the king and the two rooks are defending this bishop and you might say that's overkill but that would be wrong because the people from men at work weren't even born yet ridiculous i got two pieces attacking your bishop that you have three pieces defending your bishop so you're like well i can move one away what's the harm in that so he blundered here but if he plays perfectly his position is terrible played king e1 double question mark and now very easy win knight b3 i like the way all these super gms are blundering against rashevsky because of all the pressure he puts on he just misses like obvious moves if the rook moves away i take your bishop and your knights attacked so king e1 is just terrible uh although the position is pretty terrible okay so bob venice not going down like no punk right his name's botvenic his his name's not joe smith right so he plays the craziest move you've ever seen confusing the audience but not reshefsky question okay bam knight d5 that doesn't do anything but you know it's so scary-looking all right takes bishop takes and lucky for him this don't wipe he's hoping the rook moves away and then you know to take the you know that's looking pretty good for white and roshewski's like you know come on you know who i am yeah here here black is up a rook but if he moves his rook like some of you would do okay and now bob vedic's not kidding now i'm not saying that white's winning or even better but all right this is the best position bob fenix had this whole game so yeah you don't do that you don't give him counter play you sack the exchange roshewski knows what i'm doing and then white center is irrelevant yeah and black's just up a piece yeah and then white resigned i think after i think king e2 they were trying to put the kings in the middle no i'm kidding yeah so i mean bob and it just got crushed that game he was like equal slightly worse clearly loris lost and he's he became world champion that tournament and he was white so chess is hard no matter how good you are everybody beats you even when you're world champion which is funny in botvinnik's case because when he was world champion he never won a world championship match he always lost or drew the matches then when the other guy was world champion who beat bob vinick they never won a match it's tough being world champion getting crushed so yeah ah yeah the engine or some that wasn't the engine it was some annotator they said rook h1 is better okay and then they gave some crazy analysis which i haven't looked at bam and i'm too old for this although i do like black threatening bishop takes bishop check winning a piece and then you can't take the knight because rook takes rook if i play rook d1 there's knight b2 so mean he's lost it's true uh but yeah this is why h4 is an amazing move white can't move right the if the bishop or the knight move this is hanging if either rook moves i could take on c4 and if the king moves then we see what happened and the pawns can't move because you know they knew the on passant rule back then it's amazing how good h4 is it's like a puzzle it's like h4 is looks long baffinic with white not getting in zigzag a lot okay even if you pronounce it right he's still not getting in it right so the germans out there they're like he's not getting in what it doesn't matter all right so great games for mashevsky i recommend if you like reshefsky not as a person but as a chess player you should look at a lot of his games because he won a lot of games but this lecture is not 10 hours long i can't i can't show you the dozens and dozens of games he won against the best players in the world because you know we don't have time i got to watch the braves play the dodgers you know come on yeah so i hope you enjoyed that lecture i know i did we want to once again thank our sponsor jay wilson and a shout out to tom hanks for finding us a sponsor if you want to sponsor a lecture i mean uh email karen atlchestclub.com and the more money you give us the more lectures we do always on wednesday night same time same channel thanks for watching this lecture on rashfi and we'll see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: GMBenjaminFinegold

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Keywords: games, twitch, Chess, GM Ben Finegold, board, game, Ben Finegold, streaming, live, stream, winning, checkmate, losing, sacrifice, attack, openings, traps, forks, skewers, grandmaster, best chess channel, best youtube chess channel, karen, karen boyd, boyd, karen boyd chess, Queen's Gambit, daily dose of Ben Finegold, Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Atlanta, funny chess, CCSCATL, subscribe, asmr, rating, chess analysis, Samuel Reshevsky

Id: oSk7i-NmPkw

Length: 49min 20sec (2960 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2022