A Perfect Game by Euwe!

  

    Max Euwe is an unappreciated World Champion. He was an amateur player balancing his mathematics career with chess and he had a short reign, plus his style lacked the aggressiveness of his contemporaries. 

    Euwe has wrongly been labeled as a boring, purely positional player. However, he was an elite positional strategist and a brilliant tactician. As an author he wrote over 70 books on chess theory. I read a couple and found then dry and boring. 

    I met Euwe in 1959 and found him to be a refined and kind gentleman who signed his autograph for me writing, “I wish you good luck with chess interest. Sincerely, M. Euwe.” 

 

    In the following game Thomas, who had what was probably the best tournament of his career, made what appears to be an insignificant mistake at move 16, but Euwe shows how a world class player can jump all over such a move! What’s truly amazing about this game is that when doing an analysis with the Fritz GUI and Stockfish 18 Euwe was assigned an accuracy score of a perfect 100%.