My Favourite Game Of. Number 28. Vyacheslav Ragozin.

Well, it's been a while since I did one of these little 'My Favourite game Of ' posts. I was inspired to do this one by reading Douglas Griffin's latest wonderful blog. Please go there, and find Ragozin's own notes to the game and plenty more.

https://dgriffinchess.wordpress.com/2022/04/30/viacheslav-ragozin-1908-1962/  

You can also find more Griffin material on Ragozin here :-  

https://dgriffinchess.wordpress.com/2019/09/14/ragozins-games-v-reshevsky-semmering-1937-lisitsyn-11th-ussr-ch-leningrad-1939-with-annotations-by-lipnitsky-ragozin/

The blog had one of favourite games ever, which, somehow, I never seem to have gotten round to posting. 

Ragozin was one of those players who was both an over the board Grandmaster and also a correspondence chess Grandmaster. In fact, in c.c. he was the second World Champion.

Very pushed for time here, so I will not write too much about him, - you can find plenty in the two aforementioned blogs and with a quick google search, etc. He was, however, one of the most interesting players who developed in the USSR in the 1930's. Where others had started looking at things like the Grunfeld and the King's Indian, where Black meets 1.d4 with an attempt to play on the dark squares, he was more a follower - as a number of his Soviet predecessors of the 1920's were -  of Nimzowitsch, who looked to meet 1.d4 with play on the light squares, and the defence named after him is along those lines.

Let's quickly do some chess games and pictures!!

Well, it is easy for me to understand why I like his games so much- I first wrote article about him nearly 30 years ago!! He was consciously creative, and - one reason that he worked with Botvinnik - a very fine analyst.

Before the featured game I will give some of his correspondence games. Here is an early one that was ahead of it's time. It bears comparison with a famous game of Tal's that I posted here :- https://www.chess.com/blog/simaginfan/some-more-tal-and-some-benoni-madness-my-week-in-chess 

I used his idea to win a c.c game myself, in a Leningrad Dutch.

O.K. Some more correspondence games from his World Championship victory.

When you look at his games from that event, he seems to have scored most of his wins by out analysing his opponents - not so easy at that level!! Three examples.

Firstly one against one of the greats, who also held both the c.c. and o.b. Grandmaster titles when they meant something, the wonderful Lothar Schmidt.

I would love to spend a year in his library - maybe two, or three, or.....

And two King's Indians - he seems to have prepared that opening for the tournament. How many hours must these guys have wasted working on 'The Ragozin Defence'!! Both are complex and beautiful, and Ragozin wins the analysis competition. No time to do notes to them, but hopefully you will enjoy them.

This one is fabulous, and baffling at the same time!

So, my favourite Ragozin game is an incredible battle with one of those players I really love.

https://www.chess.com/blog/simaginfan/andor-lilienthal-champions-friend-friendships-champion  Andor Lilienthal. 

Quite a special game, and quite a battle! You will find Ragozin's own notes in the Douglas Griffin blog linked to above, so I have given my own take on the game - that the engines will probably make look silly - but I enjoyed doing them, and that is my great pleasure in doing such things. Enjoy the game!! It's a classic and, as you will see from my notes, after over 40 years of looking at it I still don't understand it..