Reeling in the years

So what's Ray been up to this week? I believe he's been in Mexico, but while he's been away, his columns in the Times have been treating us to Petrosian. Here's his column from Saturday, August 24 2013, offering us Petrosian-Botvinnik, the nineteenth game from their 1963 match.

As ever with any old game that Ray chooses to annotate, the challenge for the reader is to find out where the notes have been cribbed from and in this instance we can locate them in a 2006 Batsford book written by Raymond Keene and Julian Simpole and entitled Petrosian vs the Elite.

The column game is number 23 in the book, appearing on pages 83-88.

As one can easily see, a number of the Times notes have been adapted from the 2006 book, including the one for Black's fourteenth:

Or Black's eighteenth:

Or White's twenty-third.

Next day, in the Sunday Times for 25 August he gave us Keres-Petrosian from the 1959 Candidates Tournament.

This one is game 15 in the 2006 book and appears on pages 61-65.

Here for instance is Black's thirtieth:

Black's thirty-ninth:

White's forty-second:

White's fifty-first.

You get the idea. So rather than wade through pages, let's restrict ourselves to edited highlights for the rest of the week's columns.

Monday 26 August: Petrosian-Benko, Piatigorsky Cup 1963, game 24 in the book, pages 89-92.

White's twelfth:

White's twentieth:

Black's thirty-third:

Tuesday 27 August: Petrosian-Gligoric, Piatigorsky Cup 1963, game 25 in the book, pages 92-96.

White's eleventh:

White's thirteenth:

White's seventeenth:

Black's nineteenth:

Black's twenty-seventh:

White's thirty-fourth:

Wednesday 28 August: Benko-Petrosian, Piatigorsky Cup 1963, game 26 in the book, pages 96-101.

White's sixteenth:

White's twenty-third:

Black's twenty-seventh:

White's thirty-eighth:

White's thirty-ninth:

Thursday 29 August: Petrosian-Tal, Moscow 1963, game 27 in the book, pages 101-104.

By this stage you'll have noticed that with the exception of the Sunday Times piece, Ray has just run through five consecutive games in his own book. Still, at least this time he changes round the wording a bit more than in the previous pieces and there's only a couple of really shameless copyings.

Black's eighteenth:

White's forty-seventh:

What of today, Friday 30 August? It's Petrosian-Psakhis, Las Palmas 1982 and breaking the sequence by going all the way to game 68, pages 240-243. I wonder why? Whatever the reason, here's a couple of fairly close copyings to complete our set. Black's twenty-second:

White's thirty-first:

and thirty-second in the 2006 book.

Not a festival of copying though: just a little bit of dipping-in, really, especially compared to one or two of the pieces above).

Some extra amusement is to be gained from looking at the end of the game in the 2006 book, where the following paragraph occurs.

I'd have thought the less Ray said about being a second at an Interzonal, the better off he'd be.

- - - - - - - - - -

It's not all one way though. Just as The Batsford book has been recycled into the Times, so material from the Spectator has been recycled into the Batsford book.

Here's pages 6 and 7 from the introduction

The latter part of this is devoted to an entertaining piece of old-grudge-airing on Ray's part

but the rest is largely about the chances Petrosian missed during the 1956 Candidates Tournament.

Ray invites us:

Examine them indeed! And when you have examined them, examine the notes that go with them, and then examine the Spectator column Fish Tales in the issue for 8 June 2002 and see how many you can catch.

They're even (like most of this week's Times columns) in the same order. And the same position as before provides the puzzle.

Only this paragraph of commentary is in a different position

and even then it is almost identically-worded to its counterpart that appeared in the Spectator four years earlier.

That's better. That's more like proper copying.

[Thanks to Angus French]

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