One could probably write a book about unfortunate chess players.

I would like to mention a player who was perhaps not unfortunate in terms of money and poverty.

One whose fate was intervened and heavily influenced by the most notorious event of the 20th century: World War II.

Paul Keres.

Keres is by far the strongest Estonian chess player ever.

He is also considered to be one of the best chess players never to become a World Champion. Despite being among the best players on the planet for almost 30 years, he never played the match for the crown against Botvinnik.

Most people, however, underestimate the impact of things happening off-the-board on Keres’ career. Let’s travel all the way back to 1938 and examine these circumstances.

• 1938

In the historic AVRO tournament, the strongest tournament of that era, happened. The best players of two generations gathered. The winner of the tournament was supposed to challenge the world champion, Alexander Alekhine, to a match.

The joint victors were Keres and Fine. After his victory, Keres promptly scheduled a meeting with Alekhine and expected to arrange the details of the future match.

However, Keres was forestalled by... Botvinnik. After his victories against Capablanca and Alekhine, Botvinnik thought he has gained the right to challenge Alekhine as well.

In my personal opinion, I think that this egotistic behaviour was typical of the 6th World Champion. Apparently, the significance of the AVRO tournament result was not that relevant to him.

Therefore, Alekhine was reluctant to sign any written arrangement with Keres. Keres left, the AVRO company refused to meet Alekhine's demands and the question of the next challenger was left open.

But then the World War II intervened.

• 1941

You might remember Germany invaded Estonia during Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Keres, a former Soviet citizen, now found himself on the wrong side of the line.

He had no choice but to obey the authorities and participate in numerous chess tournaments under the Nazi Regime. However, under such circumstances, it was incredibly difficult for to find motivation. As a result:

The strength of my play diminished. My games lacked freshness, ideas and my technique became very shoddy.

He was very much aware how dangerous his “collaboration” with Nazis could be shoul Germany lose the war. Allegedly, during those years Alekhine (who was also on the ‘wrong side’ and who has a tragic story himself) repeatedly asked Keres to play a match for the title, which latter always refused. Alekhine attributed that to fear - once he famously said that

They all wait until I'm 60 to play for the title.

However, the reasons for refusal were explained much later by Paul Keres himself:

What can Alekhine grant me? What kind of importance would such a contest even have? If I won the match I'd gain a bunch of worthless German marks. (...) Would it even be a match for the World Championship title? It would be a match to become the champion of a certain part of the world, that occupied by the German army... If I lost the match, though, I would forever lose the chance to compete for the title following the inevitable end of the war, and would likely lose my right to seize the World Championship title.

• 1944

Fast forward to 1944. The Soviets return. Many Estonians, fearing for their life, flee the country. Paul Keres and his family are among those who try. Why did he escape? As Joosep Gents explains (see below):

An example of the potential consequences of asserting such views was set by a stalwart of Latvian chess, Vladimirs Petrovs. While already a Soviet citizen, he publicly criticized the regime on the subject of decreasing living standards in Latvia following the establishment of Soviet rule. Inadvertently he found himself walking in the deep snow of a corrective labour camp, where he eventually perished in 1943. Keres was shrewd enough to avoid public criticism, but following the Nazi occupation it became apparent that he was not by any stretch of the imagination made of exemplary Soviet citizen material.

As mentioned above, during the War he participated in Chess events organised by Nazi Germany. As if that alone was not enough, he was also accused of maintaining friendly relations with Estonian Nationalists.

However, someone was sober enough to protect Keres from the terrible fate of Siberian gulags. But that doesn't mean there weren't any consequences:

• he was interrogated by KGB
• his friends and family were interrogated by KGB
• he was stripped of the title of Soviet Grandmaster
• he was also forbidden from participating in chess competitions
• even after his slight rehabilitation, he was banned from international competitions. This made him miss the 1946 Groningen tournament, the strongest post-war tournament, even though organisers invited him personally

Can you imagine the consequences these events had on his development as a chess player? On his playing strength?

Especially when we compare him to his main rival Botvinnik,who enjoyed the full support of the Soviet authorities, who played (and won) in Groningen and whom pretty much everybody in the Communist party wanted to become the next Champion?

• 1947

Only in 1947 was Keres slowly allowed to start playing again - and he immediately became the Soviet Champion (without Botvinnik participating). Next year, he was also allowed to play in the World Championship Tournament 1948.

To this day, it is not clear why did the Soviet authorities rehabilitate him. There were speculations they forced him to give up on his ‘World Championship dreams’ and ‘not to get in Botvinnik’s way’. Many thought he intentionally played poorly in the 1948 tournament.

These allegations were never confirmed. Besides, after all the turmoils during World War II, how could have he played well?

• 1953–1966

The 1948 World Championship tournament clearly left a mark on Keres, as his results were below his standard in the subsequent years.

The 1948-1951 period was the time when another great player never to become World Champion, David Bronstein, shone. He won major tournaments and qualified for the match against Botvinnik, which was drawn after a nail-biting finish.

The major turnaround happened in the 1951 USSR Championship when Keres became the Soviet Champion for the third time.As a result, he was awarded the first board in the Soviet team for the upcoming Olympiad (ahead of Botvinnik, whose ego found this decision so scandalous that he refused to participate at all).

These events clearly gave a new lease of life to elderly Keres. In the subsequent decade, he almost challenged Botvinnik several times, yet always missed ‘that little something’.

Starting from 1948, FIDE introduced complicated World Championship qualifying system involving of several stages. The Candidates tournament was the final stage - the winner of this tournament would get right to challenge the Champion for the title.

Keres came second (!) in four Candidates tournaments:

• 1953 Zürich, 2 points behind Smyslov
• 1956 Amsterdam, 1.5 points behind Smyslov
• 1959 Yugoslavia, 1.5 points behind Tal
• 1962 Curacao, 0.5 points behind Petrosian

The Curacao 1962 Candidates tournament was especially heartbreaking.

2 round before finish, Keres faced his eternal client Benko. Prior to this encounter he had a perfect 7–0 score against him.

Alas...this time Keres played strangely, passively and the game was adjourned in an unpleasant position for him.

During the adjournment, Benko was offered unexpected help from... Petrosian and Geller:

In this all-important game, I was a bit better and adjourned. A while later, Petrosian and Geller came to me in secret and offered to help me beat their own countryman! I was disgusted. Telling them that it would be a draw with the best play, I demanded that they leave. However, when we resumed, Keres made an error, and I won.

Source: Pal Benko: My Life, Games and Compositions

In a way, this end to the tournament was symbolic of Keres’ whole career. It was really an unfortunate end of a brilliant career - Keres wasn’t able to compete at top level afterward. Many years later, Tal remarked:

Only once did I see Keres upset: at the finish of Curacao. The theory of probability played a cruel trick on him.

To conclude, I am aware Keres’ difficulties seem like first world problems compared to some other players (Steinitz, Korchnoi, Alekhine, Morphy, Fischer come to mind, among others). Nevertheless, I think his career can best be described with the word - unfortunate.

Who knows what would have happened if Botvinnik didn’t have the support of Soviet authorities in 1938.

If he didn’t venture to negotiate with Alekhine.

Or if World War II never happened.

I admit I am quite subjective here - I like Keres and I don’t like Botvinnik.

I always become sad when I remember how close Keres was to the throne. How such a genuine nice guy was sidelined by someone unscrupulous like the sixth world champion.

Probably because today, more than 50 years later, things haven’t changed much.

Things have probably gotten even worse.

For more details, check out this fantastic articles by Estonian historian and chess enthusiast, Joosep Gents: Paul Keres III: AVRO 1938 - Rightful challenger and Paul Keres IV: The War Years