"The excitement and noise in the hall were indescribable. Play on the other boards ceased for several minutes, while chief arbiter, Milan Vidmar, quieted the spectators. Meanwhile, my friends took me away to celebrate my victory.

"It wasn't until some time later that the film crew noticed that they had failed to epochalize the moment in which I played my last move, 14 b4, the move that brought the Soviet Union the title of world champion. Noticing that the wallboard monitor, Jan Estrin, had the same color suit as mine, they pressed him into service, in place of the newly-secured world champion. The newsreel viewers never suspected that the historic move b2-b4 was made, not by the champion’s hand, but by the wallboy's!

"Nor does the b-pawn's story end here. Elizaveta Bykova took it home, as a talisman, in the belief that the pawn would help her to become [women's] world champion. And so it did!" Mrs. Bykova lost the title in 1956 to Olga Nikolaevna Rubtsova, only to regain the title two years later, in 1958. She held the title until 1962, when she lost by a score of 2-9 to a young player from Soviet Georgia, Nona Gaprindashvili, who was to usher in a new era in women's chess.