Pretty good "guess," I'd say. :-D

Worth noting in both cases was White's enormous spatial advantage.

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Black might have done better to play <18...cxd5>.

Perhaps play may have then continued <19.Nd3 Nc6> giving this position.

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But still - Petrosian is clearly winning even with this play by black.

Not much, but I love that final diamond with the knight sparkling at the toe.

But can players nowadays *afford* to have "personalities"?

One of the key characteristics of chess over time has always been the relative scarcity of really strong chess-players and a constantly-changing understanding of the game itself.

Before Steinitz, High-end chess was a game played between men with the leisure necessary to devote themselves to the game and devote a lot of time playing a game that was a matter of hack-and-slash calculation, with almost no understanding of structure and position. Then Morphy and Steinitz come around. There are still massive attacks but fewer evergreen games, players start to develop defensive technique. People stop accepting every gambit pawn thrown their way.

The first world war gives the world trench warfare and the hypermoderns come about and chessgames become wars of maneuver with people seeking breakthroughs in closed positions. Nimzowitsch, by no means the world's greatest player, elucidates a set of positional principles, filling a hole that could (and probably *should*) have been filled by Alekhine, Capablanca, Lasker...

With the level of understanding had by the end of the second world war, the stage is set for an explosion in chess. A potential great chess-player no longer has to "invent the wheel", part of his ability can be the result of study and the Soviet Union, trying to prove the value of its socialism teaches chess the way the Boy Scouts teach woodcraft as Botvinnik and others world-wide are working on the problem of how to make a computer play chess.

Now, you have everything in chess that we have: economies providing children with leisure, online databases of millions of games, and computer programs that are strong enough to work out and test deep continuations in opening lines.

Now, it seems that chess games are more and more a contest not of personalities, but of greater and greater efficiencies in applying the principles of chess that have come down to us from earlier generations and periods in history and with the approach that successful prosecution of a chess game makes necessary, there seems to be less and less of the "wiggle-room" that allows personality to shine through across the board.

If this is right, then it is also unfortunate, because the games of great players of the past are delightful. Petrosian was often bound by a long-strings of draws but his wins were often just as much works of art as the attacks of Tal, Fischer and Kasparov.

Well-written and cogent analysis.