Chess Strategy and Tactics: Tigran Petrosian's Amazing Games

Tigran Petrosian has created the reputation of being one of the most sophisticated World Champions with specialisms in exchange sacrifice, prophylaxis, and prevention strategies. He is also one of the most successful world champions.

Petrosian really did not like losing! In fact, Petrosian's consistent skills and resourcefulness to avoid defeat earned him the nickname "Iron Tigran". He was considered by many to be the hardest player to beat in the history of chess. Future World Champion Vladimir Kramnik called him "the first defender with a capital D". Even Garry Kasparov had extreme difficulties when playing Tigran Petrosian, losing the first two encounters in a dramatic fashion.

Petrosian's extreme playing style has fascinated and intrigued future generations of players trying to study and fathom his games. Petrosian was a Nimzovich and Capablanca fan which explains many of his playing attributes. His prophylaxis style of reducing risk and trying to seek the logic of the chessboard, and reducing unnecessary risks, in general, contribute to him being very difficult to beat. Often this would result in draws for sure which may not have given him a daring attacking reputation during the time of his career. But in retrospect now, we can be selective and choose the more interesting wins of Petrosian using a relatively risk-free style. It is this playing style that Anatoly Karpov has admitted during an interview at Gibraltar, to making use of. But Karpov emphasizes playing for a win quite often instead of a draw and modeling some of the same positional opening choices of Tigran Petrosian such as the Caro-Kann with the black pieces against 1.e4.  We can all choose to do this if we do want to play for a win, and the end result is playing for a win in a more secure relative-risk-free manner. The chessboard does not have to be a kind of gambling casino full of chance and luck, but can instead by driven by logic and control, and the gradual accumulation of advantages in a relatively noncontroversial manner.

Although during his lifetime he was not so well appreciated like many of the great artists in many other domains, his victories and triumphs have been celebrated through many Petrosian memorial tournaments, which put greater emphasis on his amazing track record.

Tigran Petrosian's amazing track record includes:

• Candidate for the World Chess Championship on eight occasions (1953, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1971, 1974, 1977, and 1980)

• Defending World Champion or a World Championship Candidate in ten consecutive three-year cycles

• Victories in two World Championship matches against Botwinnik and Spassky

• First prize in the World Championship Candidates Tournament - Four Soviet Championship titles

• Two individual and team gold medals on top board for the USSR team in the international Olympiads of Havana 1966 and Lugano 1968

• Numerous first prizes in important tournaments

• Match and game victories against Kasparov, Fischer, Karpov, Hübner Portisch, Korchnoi, Polugayevsky, Smyslov, Tal, Euwe, Reshevsky, Keres and many others

• Overall performance in Olympiad play very impressively: +78−1=50 (only one game lost, to Robert Hübner, out of 129 played), for 79.8 per cent, the third all-time best performance after Anatoly Karpov (+43−2=23 for 80.1 per cent) and Mikhail Tal (+65−2=34 for 81.2 per cent)

• Petrosian also made the Soviet team for the first eight European Team Championships (from 1957 to 1983). He won eight team gold medals and four board gold medals. His totals in Euro teams play, according to olimpbase online site are (+15−0=37), for 64.4 percent

This course focuses in particular on Petrosian's more interesting games - his relatively shorter wins, in particular, are brought into focus in this course. But also includes many of his more important games regardless of game length to show the true depth of his playing style and deep positional understanding.