[10] In autumn 1923, at the age of twelve,[2] Botvinnik was taught chess by a school friend of his older brother, using a home-made set, and instantly fell in love with the game.

In winter 1924, Botvinnik won his school's championship, and exaggerated his age by three years in order to become a member of the Petrograd Chess Assembly – to which its president turned a blind eye.

[13] While waiting, he qualified for his first USSR Championship final stage in 1927 as the youngest player ever at that time,[14][15] tied for fifth and sixth places and gained the title of master.

[13] He wanted to study Electrical Technology at the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute and passed the entrance examination; however, there was a persistent excess of applications for this course and the Proletstud, which controlled admissions, had a policy of admitting only children of engineers and industrial workers.

Leningrad won and the team manager, who was also deputy chairman of the Proletstud, secured Botvinnik a transfer to the Polytechnic's Electromechanical Department, where he was one of only four students who entered straight from school.

[16] In late summer 1931, he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering,[dubious – discuss] after completing a practical assignment on temporary transmission lines at the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station.

He and other young masters successfully requested the support of a senior Leningrad Communist Party official in arranging contests involving both Soviet and foreign players, as there had been none since the Moscow 1925 chess tournament.

He wrote that, in London after the tournament, Emanuel Lasker said his arrival only two hours before the first round began was a serious mistake and that he should have allowed ten days for acclimatization.

[27] After consulting the nearest available Soviet officials, Botvinnik discreetly challenged Alekhine, who promptly accepted, subject to conditions that would enable him to acclimatize in Russia and get some high-quality competitive practice a few months before the match.

One striking feature of this was emphasis on opening preparation in order to gain a permanent positional advantage in the middlegame, rather than seeking immediate tactical surprises that could only be used once.

Botvinnik wrote to a friendly official, commenting that the champion was to be the winner of a match between Igor Bondarevsky and Andor Lilienthal, who had tied for first place, but had no achievements in international competition.

[38] The family found an apartment there, and Botvinnik obtained a job with the local electricity supply organization – at the lowest pay rate and on condition that he did no research, as he had only a Candidate's degree.

[37] In the evenings, Botvinnik wrote a book in which he annotated all the games of the "Absolute Championship of the USSR", in order to maintain his analytic skills in readiness for a match with Alekhine.

[37] In 1943, after a two-year lay-off from competitive chess, Botvinnik won a tournament in Sverdlovsk, scoring 1½  out of 2 against each of his seven competitors – who included Smyslov, Vladimir Makogonov, Boleslavsky, and Ragozin.

[40] Shortly afterwards, Botvinnik was urged to return to Moscow by the People's Commissar for Power Stations, an admirer and subsequent good friend.

Botvinnik opened negotiations with the British Chess Federation to host the match in England, but these were cut short by Alekhine's death in 1946.

[49] While he was on vacation in Riga after the tournament, an eleven-year-old boy called Mikhail Tal paid a visit, hoping to play a game against the new champion.

Though ranking as formal World Champion, Botvinnik had a relatively poor playing record in the early 1950s: he played no formal competitive games after winning the 1948 match tournament until he defended his title, then struggled to draw his 1951 championship match with Bronstein, placed only fifth in the 1951 Soviet Championship, and tied for third in the 1952 Géza Maróczy Memorial tournament in Budapest; and he had also performed poorly in Soviet training contests.

A staunch Communist, he was noticeably shaken by the collapse of the Soviet Union and lost some of his standing in Russian chess during the Boris Yeltsin era.

[65] According to his daughter, Botvinnik remained active until the last few months of his life, and continued to go to work until March 1995 despite blindness in one of his eyes (and extremely poor vision in the other).

[citation needed] Botvinnik played relatively poorly in the very strong 1940 Soviet Championship, finishing in a tie for fifth/sixth places, with 11½/19, two full points behind Igor Bondarevsky and Andor Lilienthal.

After a personal appeal to the defence minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, Botvinnik was exempted from war work for three days a week in order to concentrate on chess preparations.

[73] Botvinnik asked to be allowed to play in the 1956 Candidates Tournament, as he wanted to use the event as part of his warm-up for the next year's title match, but his request was refused.

[77] The statistical rating system used in Raymond Keene and Nathan Divinsky's book Warriors of the Mind concludes that Botvinnik was the fourth strongest player of all time: behind Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov and Bobby Fischer but ahead of José Raúl Capablanca, Lasker, Viktor Korchnoi, Boris Spassky, Vasily Smyslov and Tigran Petrosian.

[83] Botvinnik generally sought tense positions with chances for both sides;[84] hence his results were often better with the Black pieces as he could avoid lines that were likely to produce draws.

'"[88] Botvinnik's example and teaching established the modern approach to preparing for competitive chess: regular but moderate physical exercise; analysing very thoroughly a relatively narrow repertoire of openings; annotating one's own games, those of past great players and those of competitors; publishing one's annotations so that others can point out any errors; studying strong opponents to discover their strengths and weaknesses; ruthless objectivity about one's own strengths and weaknesses.

[89][90] Botvinnik also played many short training matches against strong grandmasters including Salo Flohr, Yuri Averbakh, Viacheslav Ragozin, and Semion Furman – in noisy or smoky rooms if he thought he would have to face such conditions in actual competition.

[99] Botvinnik was still playing a major teaching role in his late 70s, when Kramnik entered the school, and made a favorable impression on his pupil.

[103] Botvinnik's research on chess-playing programs concentrated on "selective searches", which used general chess principles to decide which moves were worth considering.

[104][105] However, his PIONEER program contained a generalized method of decision-making that, with a few adjustments, enabled it to plan maintenance of power stations all over the USSR.