Paul Keres: the eternal runner-up who never had luck

If there’s a name that symbolizes the injustice of fate in chess, it’s Paul Keres. For nearly twenty years he was one of the two or three best players in the world, with an elegant style that earned universal admiration. But the world title never came: four-time finalist in the Candidates Tournament, four times without the final result. Chess history calls him the Eternal Runner-Up or the Crown Prince.

Who was Keres

He was born on 7 January 1916 in Narva, a border city in northern Estonia that was then part of the Russian Empire. He learned to play from his father as a child and progressed self-taught, with barely any coaches or access to the international tournaments that trained the great masters of the era.

What Keres had was natural talent and a hunger for the game. As a teenager he was already competing by correspondence with players across Europe. At 20 he was one of the best in Estonia; at 22, one of the best in the world.

The AVRO tournament: the promise of a crown

In 1938, Dutch Radio AVRO organized in the Netherlands the strongest tournament in history up to then: eight players, all of them title contenders. Alekhine, Capablanca, Botvinnik, Euwe, Reshevsky and three others took part. The top two finishers were Keres and the American Reuben Fine, tied.

At 22, Keres was co-winner of the strongest tournament in the world. Everything pointed to him being the next great title contender.

Then the Second World War broke out, and chess — like the whole world — was put on hold.

The curse of the Candidates

After the war, with Estonia incorporated into the USSR and Keres now a Soviet citizen, four opportunities for the title always slipped away:

Four times among the best, four times without being crowned. The irony is that in each edition the winner was different — suggesting it wasn’t a problem of style but of a minimal margin that luck never accompanied.

There’s a less romantic and more political version: some historians suggest Soviet pressure influenced the world champion being Russian rather than Estonian, and that Keres — who had played in tournaments during the Nazi occupation — was subtly “held back” at decisive moments. The theory is controversial and hard to prove.

The most elegant style of his era

What no one disputes is the quality of his play. Keres was a brilliant attacking player — capable of sacrifices of a beauty only Tal surpasses in Soviet history — combined with positional technique and endgame endurance that made him complete. His contemporaries spoke of him with unreserved admiration: Botvinnik, Smyslov, Fischer and Kasparov named him among their great influences.

Fischer, not given to easy praise, said Keres was “one of the greatest of all time.”

He died on 5 June 1975 in Helsinki, on his way back from a tournament in Vancouver (Canada), at age 59. His face has been printed on Estonian kroon banknotes for decades: a nation’s recognition of the best player it produced.

His chess DNA

In our chess DNA system, Keres represents the elegant, complete attacker profile: aggression combined with technique and the consistency of a great champion. If your GM twin is Keres, your strength lies in brilliant attack and universality; your biggest challenge might be the psychological aspect in moments of maximum pressure.

Keep exploring

• Mikhail Tal, the other great attacking genius of the Soviet school
• Mikhail Botvinnik, the champion of his era
• All players