Roger de Coverly wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 10:24 am
The Olympiad board orders give a clue as to respective rankings.
Maybe. Wasn’t Hartston board 1 because he was British Champion though? I think that was the tradition back then. I could be wrong.
Miles was awared the GM title at Haifa as was Ray. Ray admittedly only on the last day for his performance at the Olympiad. Miles was a GM elect prior to the event, of course.
I’m not really sure about 'talent' and what that means exactly, or how you measure it. In terms of achievements, though, I don’t think there’s any question that Ray was ahead of Bill Hartston.
One was that RDK lead the way is that he has a good case for saying he was the first to stop playing in the British Championship because it wasn’t worth it for him.
In the 60s I’ve no doubt that Penrose winning all the time was absolutely a reflection of him being the best player. I’m not sure you can say the same from 1972 onwards.
I think it was 1970 that Ray challenged Penrose to a match and the latter declined. Now that, I would say, is a clue to their respective strengths at the time.
Incidentally, on the question of professionalising British chess (in terms of attitude, at least) Hartston once said,
I think we were the intermediate generation. There was the Penrose-Golombek-Alexander era which had no way of competing with the top Eastern Europeans and just got completely overtaken by them in the '50s and '60s. Then Keene and I, and Basman maybe, we introduced a sort of professionalism without being professional: professionalism in terms of attitude to the game. I think that sort of set the road to the next generation of Miles and Short, Stean maybe, just to completely overtake us.
https://streathambrixtonchess.blogspot. ... tston.html