The wiliest, boringest, most elusive, most modern of world champions, Petrosian remains a difficult and contradictory figure. His play combines deft tactical awareness with an acute sense of prophylaxis , so that opponents have the greatest difficulty in laying a finger on him. And for his own part, he often seems content holding the margin of the draw than undertaking any heroics in pursuit of a win. In the analysis room, and in blitz games, Petrosian’s abundant tactical skills were apparent to everyone, but to the spectator of his tournament games, these were far from obvious, and he was regarded as dull and perhaps relatively weak.
You don’t get to be world champion without having something going for you, and I have included one game below designed to dispel the idea that Petrosian cannot attack. But like Ulf Andersson, his youthful attacking phase matured into a highly sophisticated positional style, where a web of small moves can bind and hold the opposing pieces, and his tactical skills were used to anticipate and avoid the attacking ideas of his opponent. He has embraced the hypermodern style, perhaps taking to another level Nimzovitch’s ideas about prophylaxis and the centre. With this style, his tactical skills are always subservient to strategy.
What can a club player learn from a man who once opened as Black:
1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.e5 b6 5.Qg4 Bf8 6.Nf3 Qd7 7.Nb5 Nc6 and won? (Joppen,E – Petrosian,T [C16] Belgrade (11), 1954: 0-1, 56?)
A club player who is trying to decide what is going on in lots of Petrosian’s games could well do themselves a mischief. But in his most accessible games, the play contains as much tension and drama as one could hope for. And also, for my purposes, as much instruction. By all means go to masters like Morphy and Capablanca to understand simple chess. But I don’t think you will find clearer examples of how an apparently strong Pawn front can in fact turn out to be a hollow sham than in Petrosian’s games against Korchnoi and Spassky, Also notable were his games with campaigns based on colour-complexes; he more than once reduced a strong GM like Mecking to useless shuffling.