Thursday 25 July 2013

Most amazing draw ever

At some point in the past I subscribed to the Quora mailing list. Quora is a website that is kind od a Question and Answer Wikipedia, in that people post questions and then other people answer. It normally has some interesting questions each week, although I do get irritated with the fact that 'Sachin Tendulkar' is apparently always given as an answer to any question, no matter how unrelated it is (eg "Who do you think will be the next person to walk on the moon?").
This week someone asked about the "most amazing draws in chess history". The first answer was Larry Even;s swindle of Sammy Reshevsky in the 1963/64 US Championship, although to my mind it was just a stalemate trick. A better answer was Hamppe - Metner 1872, but for my money Fischer v Tal 1960 is the best.
I can remember seeing it for the first time as a kid and was amazed that the game ended the way it did. I thought surely someone must be winning, giving the number of pieces hanging in mid-air. But of course both players had managed to calculate their way through the complications, and saw that all sensible paths led to a perpetual.


Fischer,Robert James - Tal,Mihail [C17]
Leipzig ol, 1960



2 comments:

Victor said...

Great game, thanks!

Graham Clayton said...

Hi Shaun,

An excellent book you should try and find is "Draw!" by Wolfgang Heidenfeld, which is full of amazing and interesting drawn games.