64 ruutu · The king of Estonian chess
, Narva , Helsinki
The boy from Narva learned chess from a newspaper column and played his first serious games by post. At twenty-two he won AVRO 1938 against one of the strongest fields ever assembled. Four times he stood one step from the world title. His country put him on its banknote.
tap a square: the knight starts there arrows: one step at a time
from f5 · closed tour, tie-break 1: index
01BeginningsAlgus
01 · Narva · 59°23′N 28°11′E
Pärnu had little chess literature and even fewer opponents. So the moves went by post and the reply took weeks. At nineteen he was Estonian champion, at twenty-two first among the best in the world.
Paul Keres was born on 7 January 1916 in Narva, where his parents had fled from Pärnu for fear of the front approaching from Riga. He grew up in Pärnu. As a schoolboy he published chess problems in newspapers and played his first serious games by post: every move in an envelope, every reply weeks away.
In 1935, at nineteen, he became European correspondence champion and, the same year, Estonian champion for the first time. That summer he sat on Estonia’s top board at the Warsaw Olympiad and scored 12½ from 19 games. His win over William Winter, a knight and a bishop thrown at the king, went round the chess press of the world.
Then it went quickly. Bad Nauheim 1936: equal first with Alekhine. Margate 1937: a win over Alekhine and equal first with Fine. Semmering–Baden 1937: clear first. All the while he was studying mathematics at the University of Tartu and editing the magazine Eesti Male.
His friend Iivo Nei recalled that at times Keres had academic periods, when he brought a theoretical physicist to mind, and at times he was a romantic at the board, with exciting, beautiful sacrificial games. Mikhail Tal said that Keres did not want merely to win – every player wants that – but to win beautifully.
02AVRO 1938AVRO 1938
02 · Amsterdam · 52°22′N 4°54′E
In November 1938 the Dutch radio company AVRO gathered the reigning world champion, two former ones, one future one and four challengers. The tournament travelled between ten cities. Keres and Fine scored 8½ each; Keres took first on the games between them, 1½–½ (the Dutch account names the Sonneborn–Berger score instead).
+3 =11 −0 · without a loss · source: the game collection
The winner was promised a match with world champion Alekhine. Ten months later the war began, and the match never came. Replay the win over Capablanca →
03The warSõda
03 · Salzburg · 47°49′N 13°03′E
In 1939 he was the challenger to the world champion. In 1940 he became a Soviet player, in 1941 an Estonian under German occupation, in 1944 a refugee who did not get away, in 1946 a man not allowed to play. In 1947 he won the USSR championship.
Board one for Estonia at the Olympiad. While the teams play, Germany invades Poland. Estonia, with Keres, Ilmar Raud, Paul Schmidt, Gunnar Friedemann and Johannes Türn, takes the bronze, the country’s greatest team result; Raud stays in Argentina. The promised match with Alekhine, the prize of AVRO, is never arranged.
sourceOn 6 August 1940 the Soviet Union annexes Estonia. Within months the AVRO winner is playing his first USSR championship in Moscow, finishing fourth. In the spring of 1941 he is second to Botvinnik in the ‘absolute championship’.
sourceUnder German occupation he plays where he is allowed to. Salzburg 1942 in the rooms of Mirabell Palace, Munich 1942, Prague 1943: second to Alekhine each time, and equal first with him at Salzburg 1943. Munich was billed as a European championship; it was a propaganda event.
sourceThe family decides to go west. On the shore at Puise, on Matsalu Bay, they wait for a motorboat to Sweden. It does not come at the agreed hour; when it arrives the Red Army already holds the coast. The Kereses stay. In Lidköping that spring he had been offered a way to remain in Sweden and had gone home.
sourceThe Soviet Union leaves him out of the 1945 USSR–USA radio match and does not let him travel to Groningen 1946. The wartime tournaments are held against him. For two years the strongest player in the country does not exist abroad.
sourceAllowed back, he wins the USSR championship in Leningrad. Not everyone is glad: one opponent, after beating him, is reported to have shouted ‘I killed a fascist.’ He wins the title again in 1950 and 1951.
sourceThe 1948 match-tournament in The Hague and Moscow decided the title left vacant by Alekhine’s death. Botvinnik won; Keres lost four of their five games and shared third with Reshevsky. The question has been asked ever since: was he pressured?
Botvinnik is said to have stated in an interview that an order came from Stalin: Smyslov and Keres were to lose to him. The claim circulates second-hand and historians contest it.
Keres himself is said to have told the chess historian Ken Whyld that he was pressured but threw no game. That, too, is a second-hand testimony.
In 1996 the US champion Larry Evans went through all the 1948 Keres–Botvinnik games and listed the moves he considered suspicious. His conclusions remain contested.
The background is known: an annexed homeland, wartime tournaments in Germany, post-war executions. No decisive proof has been found in the archives. The game is adjourned; the envelope stays open.
04The eternal secondIgavene teine
04 · Curaçao · 12°07′N 68°56′W
The Candidates tournament chose the world champion’s challenger. Keres played six of them and finished second four times: Zürich 1953, Amsterdam 1956, Yugoslavia 1959 and Curaçao 1962, where half a point separated him from Petrosian.
Against the winner Botvinnik 1/5, +1 =0 −4. Losses: Smyslov (with Black), Reshevsky (with Black), Reshevsky (with White), Botvinnik (with White), Botvinnik (with Black), Botvinnik (with White), Botvinnik (with Black). With White 5/10, with Black 5½/10.
Against the winner Bronstein ½/2, +0 =1 −1. Losses: Kotov (with Black), Bronstein (with Black). With White 5/9, with Black 4½/9.
Against the winner Smyslov 0/2, +0 =0 −2. Losses: Smyslov (with Black), Smyslov (with White), Bronstein (with Black), Averbakh (with White). With White 7½/14, with Black 8½/14.
Against the winner Smyslov 1/2, two draws. Loss: Filip (with White). With White 5/9, with Black 5/9.
Against the winner Tal 3/4, +3 =0 −1. Losses: Fischer, Fischer, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Olafsson — all six losses with White. With White 6½/14, with Black 12/14.
Against the winner Petrosian 2/4, four draws. Losses: Benko (with Black), Fischer (with Black). With White 8½/13, with Black 8½/14.
winner Keres · bar length = points out of rounds
05The gamesPartiid
05 · The 64 squares
Every game has the moment when the board turns. The engine measured those moments; the notes say what happened. Arrow keys step, Space plays.
The move the board turned on
turns at 12…Bd6 · +1.2 → +3.0 · largest jump 17…Be4 +3.1 · 5 level plies
turns at 22…Qb4 · +1.4 → +8.3 · also the largest jump (+7.0) · 15 level plies
turns at 25…Rb5 · +1.0 → +4.2 · also the largest jump (+3.2) · 16 level plies
turns at 40.Kxe1 · +1.4 → +2.1 · largest jump 39…Bc5 −2.8 · 46 level plies
turns at 16…Qb7 · +1.1 → +2.4 · largest jump 21…Bxg2 +1.5 · 17 level plies
turns at 23…Bh6 · +1.4 → +1.8 · largest jump 24.fxe7 +2.6 · 35 level plies
turns at 7…Bxf3 · +1.4 → +1.7 · largest jump 25…Ne5 +1.3 · 9 level plies
turns at 19…h6 · +0.8 → +2.8 · largest jump 20…Kf8 +5.8 · 12 level plies
turns at 29…N6d7 · +0.6 → +5.6 · also the largest jump (+5.0) · 24 level plies
turns at 29.Nd2 · +0.7 → +4.5 · also the largest jump (+3.8) · 35 level plies
turns at 36.Re8 · +1.4 → +2.8 · largest jump 37.Re4 +1.5 · 37 level plies
turns at 17…Qe7 · +1.3 → +1.7 · largest jump 25…Rc7 +3.9 · 27 level plies
turns at 14…Nb8 · +0.9 → +2.4 · largest jump 24…Qg4 +5.2 · 22 level plies
Find Keres’s move
Positions from his games, Keres to move. In each, by the engine, one move is clearly better than the rest: the one he played. Pick a piece, pick a square.
1 / 17 · 0 / 17 solved
06OpeningsAvangud
06 · Move one
The Keres Attack in the Sicilian, the Keres Defence in the Ruy Lopez, the Keres Variation in the Nimzo-Indian: opening theory remembers him in every major opening. Press play and the moves appear on the board.
A40
1. d4 e6 2. c4 Bb4+ 3. Nc3
Older than Keres himself: 1.d4 e6 2.c4 Bb4+ was known in the 1840s and Henry Thomas Buckle played it against Löwenthal in London in 1851. The name came later, from the man who made it respectable. source
B81
1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 d6 6. g4
The point of 6.g4: Black’s ...e6 has shut the c8-bishop out of g4, so the pawn goes forward with tempo, chases the knight from f6 and the attack on the king begins. ChessBase calls it his best-known contribution to opening theory. source
C96
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. O-O Be7 6. Re1 b5 7. Bb3 d6 8. c3 O-O 9. h3 Na5 10. Bc2 c5 11. d4 Nd7
His name inside his favourite opening. At Curaçao 1962, in round 21, Fischer beat him in this very line. source
E32
1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4 4. Qc2 O-O 5. a3 Bxc3+ 6. Qxc3 b6
One of the three opening families where, by the Russian Chess Federation’s account, his theoretical work mattered most: the Spanish, the Sicilian and the Nimzo-Indian. source
A00
1. g4 d5 2. Bg2 e5 3. d4 exd4 4. c3
A07
1. Nf3 d5 2. g3 Bg4
A09
1. Nf3 d5 2. c4 dxc4 3. e3 Be6
A14
1. c4 e6 2. Nf3 d5 3. g3 Nf6 4. Bg2 Be7 5. O-O c5 6. cxd5 Nxd5 7. Nc3 Nc6
A21
1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 d6 3. g3 c6
A23
1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. g3 c6
A35
1. c4 c5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Nc3 Nc6 4. g3 e6
B00
1. e4 Nc6 2. d4 e5 3. dxe5 Nxe5 4. Nc3
B04
1. e4 Nf6 2. e5 Nd5 3. d4 d6 4. Nf3 g6 5. Bc4 Nb6 6. Bb3 Bg7 7. a4
B20
1. e4 c5 2. Ne2
B90
1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. Be3 e6 7. g4
B90
1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. Be3 e6 7. g4 e5 8. Nf5 g6 9. g5
C07
1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nd2 c5 4. Ngf3
C32
1. e4 e5 2. f4 d5 3. exd5 e4 4. d3 Nf6 5. Nd2
C33
1. e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. Nc3
C68
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Bxc6 dxc6 5. Nc3
D98
1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5 4. Nf3 Bg7 5. Qb3 dxc4 6. Qxc4 O-O 7. e4 Bg4 8. Be3 Nfd7 9. Be2 Nb6 10. Qd3 Nc6 11. O-O-O
E25
1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4 4. f3 d5 5. a3 Bxc3+ 6. bxc3 c5 7. cxd5 Nxd5 8. dxc5
E53
1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4 4. e3 O-O 5. Bd3 d5 6. Nf3 c5 7. O-O b6
E93
1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7 4. e4 d6 5. Nf3 O-O 6. Be2 e5 7. d5 Nbd7 8. Bg5 h6 9. Bh4 g5 10. Bg3 Nh5 11. h4
Names and moves: the lichess.org openings table (CC0). source
07StudiesEtüüdid
07 · Pärnu · 58°23′N 24°30′E
The young Keres sent studies to newspapers and chess magazines: a small position, one key move after which everything fits. Six of them are here to solve; for five the engine confirms the key move is the only one, for one Keres and the engine disagree — the page shows both.
1 / 6 · 0 / 6 solved
The studies are Paul Keres’s compositions. First printings, as the YACPDB database records them: Neue Leipziger Zeitung 1935 · Vaba Maa 1936 · Magyar Sakkvilág 1936 (honourable mention) · Neue Leipziger Zeitung 1937 · Deutsche Schachblätter 1939 · Deutsche Schachblätter 1942.
08Words and booksSõnad ja raamatud
08 · Tallinn · 59°26′N 24°45′E
He said little and wrote a great deal. Textbooks that taught three generations of Estonian players; a hundred games in his own words; an endgame book still in print half a century on.
The older I grow, the more I value pawns.
The older I grow, the more I value pawns.
My task is to move the pawns forward.
Minu ülesanne on ettureid edasi nihutada.
No, it was a true Estonian game!
Ei, see oli tõeline eesti partii!
No one was ever born a master. The road to that title leads through years of study, struggle, joy and sorrow.
“Keres failed in this respect because he lacked the killer instinct. He was too mild a person to give his all in order to defeat his opponents. He took everything, including his chess, philosophically.”
“What, then, kept him from taking that last step? Evidently a peculiarity of character.”
„Mis teda siis segas seda viimast sammu tegemast? Ilmselt iseloomu eripära.“
“At times he had academic periods of a sort; he brought a theoretical physicist to mind. But at times he was romantic at the board. He had exciting, beautiful games, with sacrifices.”
„Kohati olid tal mingid akadeemilised perioodid, tuletas teoreetilist füüsikut meelde. Aga kohati ta oli romantiline laua taga. Tal oli põnevaid, ilusaid, ohvritega partiisid.“
“Keres did not want only to win – every chess player wants that – but to win beautifully, convincingly, completely.”
„Keres ei tahtnud ainult võita – seda tahab iga maletaja – vaid võita kaunilt, veenvalt, terviklikult.“
“By moving pawns forward, Paul Keres rose to become one of Estonia’s greatest cultural phenomena, whose name time will not erase from chess history.”
„Ettureid edasi nihutades tõusis Paul Keres üheks Eesti suurimaks kultuurifenomeniks, kelle nime aeg maleajaloost ei kustuta.“
Pick a spine. Arrow keys move along the shelf.
Eesti Maleliidu Kirjastus; Pedagoogiline Kirjandus (1947)
His first textbook, issued by the Estonian Chess Federation on the eve of the war and reissued in 1947 as ‘Elementary instruction and opening theory I’. The first of the Malekool series that taught generations of Estonian players.
sourcePhiladelphia
A collection of his games by Fred Reinfeld, published in Philadelphia in the middle of the war, while its subject was playing under German occupation.
sourceEesti Riiklik Kirjastus
The second volume, devoted to opening theory.
sourceEesti Riiklik Kirjastus
A whole monograph on a single opening, the French Defence, in Estonian. The opening he beat Capablanca and Botvinnik in.
sourceEesti Riiklik Kirjastus, Tallinn · 488 pp.
A hundred games chosen and annotated by Keres himself, 488 pages. The core of his own account of his chess; the English trilogy grew out of it. Signed copies still circulate among Estonian antiquarians.
sourceSwedish original 1961; Penguin, 1964 (trans. Harry Golombek) · 236 pp.
Kotov wrote on planning and attacking the king; Keres contributed the chapter on how to defend difficult positions, a signature piece of his chess thinking.
sourceHerbert Jenkins, London (trans. Harry Golombek); Arco, 1972
The Early Games, The Middle Years and The Later Years of Paul Keres, three volumes of his own annotations in English. The 1972 one-volume Arco edition is called ‘The Complete Games’ and holds eighty of them.
sourceHis later selection of a hundred games, 1929–1964, with his own notes. According to Estonian Wikipedia it appeared only in Russian.
sourceTallinn
A primer for young players, written with his friend and closest Estonian colleague Iivo Nei.
sourceWest Germany 1973; B. T. Batsford, 1974 (trans. John Littlewood)
Elementary endings, pawn endings, queen endings, rook endings (the largest part), bishop and knight endings. Still in print half a century later, reissued in modern notation.
sourcePergamon Press
Two volumes by opening: Closed Games (170 games, 1987) and Open and Semi-Open Games (240 games, 1990). Four hundred and ten annotated Keres games, the largest collection there is.
sourceB. T. Batsford
Two volumes: his career to the world-title battles, mostly in his own words, and then 1950 to 1975, with the late games annotated by John Nunn. Together the most comprehensive annotated Keres.
sourceEesti Raamat, Tallinn · 184 pp.
Reminiscences of Keres, compiled by Merike Rõtova.
sourceOlympia, Tallinn · 605 pp.
Reminiscences, materials and letters, compiled by Paavo Kivine.
source09TimelineAjajoon
09 · Narva – Helsinki · 1916 – 1975 · 202 km
Like a scoresheet: number, time, place, move. Choose what to look at and scroll; the line in the margin grows with you.
Paul Keres is born on 7 January 1916 in Narva, where his parents had fled from Pärnu with their elder son Harald, fearing the front approaching from Riga.
sourceHe grows up in Pärnu, publishes chess problems in newspapers as a schoolboy and plays his first serious chess by post. In 1934 he finishes the Pärnu Boys’ Gymnasium (one page of the same Estonian sporting biographical lexicon gives 1937 instead).
sourceAt nineteen he wins the first of his five Estonian championships (1935, 1942, 1943, 1945, 1953) and, the same year, the European correspondence championship.
sourceOlympiad debut on Estonia’s top board: 12½ points from 19 games (+11 =3 −5), including the win over William Winter, a knight and a bishop thrown at the king, that made his name.
sourceFirst international success: equal first with world champion-to-be Alexander Alekhine at Bad Nauheim, 6½/9 without a loss. At the unofficial Munich Olympiad the same year he takes board gold on Estonia’s first board.
sourceFrom 1936 to 1940, while rising into the world elite, he edits the Estonian chess magazine Eesti Male.
sourceHe enrols to study mathematics at the University of Tartu in 1937; the sources disagree on when he finished, 1941 by one account, 1943 by others. In September he wins Semmering–Baden, his first victory in a top-class field.
sourceOn 7 April 1937 the twenty-one-year-old beats Alekhine with White in a Ruy Lopez. He shares first place with Reuben Fine, both undefeated; Alekhine finishes third.
sourceOne of the strongest tournaments ever held: the reigning world champion, two former champions, one future champion, four challengers, ten Dutch cities. Undefeated, Keres ties with Fine on 8½/14 and takes first on their head-to-head score. A nineteen-move draw in the last round on 27 November seals it.
sourceBoard one for Estonia at the Buenos Aires Olympiad. While the teams play, Germany invades Poland. Estonia, with Keres, Raud, Schmidt, Friedemann and Türn, takes the bronze: the country’s greatest team result, and its last Olympiad as an independent republic. The promised match with Alekhine is never arranged.
sourceOver the winter of 1939–40 he beats former world champion Max Euwe in a fourteen-game match, 7½–6½. Euwe becomes a lifelong friend.
sourceOn 6 August 1940 the Soviet Union annexes Estonia. Within months the AVRO winner is playing his first USSR championship in Moscow, finishing fourth.
sourceIn the six-player match-tournament for the ‘absolute championship’ of the USSR he finishes second behind Botvinnik. The rivalry that shadows the rest of his career has begun.
sourceIn December 1941, in occupied Tartu, he marries Maria Konstantsia Riives. Their son Peeter is born in 1942 and daughter Kadrin in 1943.
sourceUnder German occupation he plays where he is allowed to: Salzburg 1942 in the Mirabell Palace, Munich 1942, Prague 1943, each time second to Alekhine, and shares first with him at Salzburg 1943. These games will be held against him for years.
sourceOn 22 September 1944 the family waits on the shore at Puise for a motorboat to Sweden. It does not come at the agreed hour; by the time it arrives the Red Army holds the coast. The Kereses stay.
sourceChess is not his only game: between 1945 and 1948 he wins three bronze medals in the doubles of the Estonian tennis championships.
sourceThe Soviet Union leaves him out of the 1945 USSR–USA radio match and does not let him play Groningen 1946. For two years the strongest player in the country is invisible abroad.
sourceAllowed back, he wins the USSR championship in Leningrad. He will win it again in 1950 and 1951.
sourceThe five-player tournament for Alekhine’s vacant title. Botvinnik wins; Keres shares third with Reshevsky after losing four games to the winner. Whether he was pressured has been argued about ever since.
sourceThe first of five Candidates tournaments. He finishes fourth; the next four times he will be second.
sourceFrom Helsinki 1952 to Tel Aviv 1964 he plays seven Olympiads for the USSR and wins team gold every time. In Tel Aviv, at forty-eight, he also takes the board gold.
sourceSmyslov wins the marathon of twenty-eight games with 18; Keres, Bronstein and Reshevsky share second on 16.
sourceA house designed for him by the architect Peeter Tarvas is completed in the garden suburb of Nõmme. The street will carry his name from 1976.
sourceOn 14 March 1955, in the USSR championship, he beats reigning world champion Botvinnik with White. Over a career he defeats nine undisputed world champions, from Capablanca to Fischer; no one else has done it.
sourceSecond again, a point and a half behind Smyslov, after a winning position against Filip slips away.
sourceHe beats the winner Tal in their individual games and still finishes a point and a half behind him. The sixteen-year-old Fischer is in the field.
sourceHis own choice of a hundred games, annotated by himself, published in Tallinn. The English trilogy Grandmaster of Chess (1964–1969) grows out of it.
sourceThe closest he ever comes: a loss to Benko from an adjourned game leaves him level with Geller, half a point behind Petrosian. He wins the play-off for second place 4½–3½. A fourth consecutive second place.
sourceIn the Candidates quarter-final in Riga he loses to Boris Spassky, 4–6. It is the last time he plays for the title.
sourceA primer for young players, written together with his friend and closest Estonian colleague, Iivo Nei.
sourceOn the first FIDE rating lists his peak is 2615, world number eleven, in July 1971. The lists began when he was already fifty-five; Chessmetrics’ retrospective rating puts his prime at 2786, second in the world for fifty-two months.
sourceHis endgame manual appears in West Germany in 1973 and in English the following year. Half a century on it is still in print.
sourceHis last year brings two tournament wins: Tallinn, ahead of Spassky, and Vancouver in May, ahead of US champion Walter Browne. His last game, with Black against Browne, is a win. The game in the collection here, his win over Denis Allan, is from the same tournament.
sourceMore than a hundred thousand people come to the funeral in Tallinn, FIDE president Max Euwe among them. He is buried at Metsakalmistu, beside the singer Georg Ots.
sourceOn the way home from Vancouver he dies of a heart attack in Helsinki on 5 June 1975. He is fifty-nine.
sourceFive months after his death the chess house at Vene 29 in the Old Town is opened in his name. The street in Nõmme where he lived is renamed after him on 9 January 1976.
sourceTallinn’s international tournament, which he had won in 1971 and 1975, is played for the first time under his name. Tal, Bronstein, Gulko and Romanishin are among the field.
sourceThe restored republic puts his portrait on the five-kroon banknote: the only chess player ever to appear on a national currency.
sourceFor his eightieth birthday Mare Mikoff’s bronze bust is unveiled on Kuninga street, in front of the former Pärnu Boys’ Gymnasium, with his signature cut into the granite.
sourceEstonia votes him its best sportsman of the twentieth century. A year later he is named among the hundred great figures of the Estonian century.
sourceOn the centenary a bronze Keres by Aivar Simson and Paul Mänd is unveiled opposite the house where his family lived in 1916, with an empty chair across the board. FIDE declares 2016 the Year of Paul Keres; Eesti Post issues a stamp.
sourceToomas Lepp’s documentary about him is trailed at the Tallinn Black Nights film festival.
sourceOn 5 June 2025 Estonian public broadcasting marks half a century since his death. Under three state systems he stayed among the best in the world, and he made chess a national pastime.
source10LegacyPärand
10 · Metsakalmistu, Tallinn · 59°28′N 24°50′E
He never became world champion. He beat every one of them: nine undisputed champions from Capablanca to Fischer, which no one else has done. In June 1975 more than a hundred thousand people came into the streets of Tallinn.
Click a name to open the game in the viewer. Nine wins; eight games in the collection here. source
59°23′N 28°12′E
The family’s address in 1916. Opposite it, on the centenary, 7 January 2016, a bronze Keres by Aivar Simson and Paul Mänd sat down at a board; passers-by may take the other chair. The board shows his last game, Browne – Keres, Vancouver 1975, after move 43. At the unveiling he had been given the white pieces though he played Black; it was put right the same year.
58°23′N 24°30′E
The former Pärnu Boys’ Gymnasium, his school 1930–1934. In front of it, since 11 August 1996, Mare Mikoff’s bronze bust on black granite, with his signature cut into the stone.
59°26′N 24°45′E
The Paul Keres Chess House in the Old Town, a fourteenth-to-fifteenth-century building opened as a chess house on 21 November 1975, months after his death. Since 2004 it has a Keres museum room with a life-size wax figure.
59°26′N 24°44′E
A chessboard platform and a bronze bust on granite by Ekke Väli, with the architects Andres Siim and Hanno Kreis, 1991; a listed cultural monument, no. 2250 in the national register.
59°28′N 24°50′E
His grave on the hill of famous Estonians, beside the singer Georg Ots.
Keres stuns Capablanca, AVRO 1938
Paul Keres. King, the trailer (PÖFF 2023)
Keres – Botvinnik, Absolute Championship, 26 March 1941
Keres sacrifices his queen: Euwe – Keres, 1940
Keres – Botvinnik, USSR Championship 1955
Keres – Fischer, Candidates 1959
Keres – Spassky, Riga 1965
The preview images come from YouTube’s servers; the player loads only when you press play.
What follows is not modesty but a list: each line is a place where the sources parted or fell silent, and which this page therefore does not assert.
What is not asserted here: that the knight’s tour on the first screen is his — it is a closed tour computed by Warnsdorff’s rule, not a historical one; that the gaps in the Candidates tournaments were fate — they are points from the tables; and that the 1948 question has an answer — the page keeps the envelope sealed.