Wednesday 2 May 2007

Chess in the attic: December 1983 (part 2)

Chess Express cover

The lead stories in issue 2 of Chess Express back in December 1983 were Garry Kasparov finding life tough at the top against Viktor Korchnoi, and Nigel Short making history in Russia.


Kasparov was trailing Korchnoi 1-0 after 5 games of their Candidates semi final match, but the 'stop press' did reveal he had adjourned with some winning chances in game 6. As we know, Kasparov won the adjournment, went on to win the match and start his saga of duels for the World crown with Anatoly Karpov.


Short meanwhile was becoming the first Western player in modern times to win a tournament in the Soviet Union, scoring 9 out of 13 in the Baku International. Incredibly, despite the field including Mark Taimanov and a number of other grandmasters, the result was not good enough for a GM norm, and 18-year old Short remained an IM.


10 years later, Nigel Short was the man who eliminated Karpov from World Championship reckoning, and went on to play Kasparov for the title. This week, he goes back to play in Baku, birthplace of Kasparov, for the first time since 1983.

2 comments:

Pawned! said...

I'm enjoying the "attic" pieces... and bring on more Nigel!

I'm working on a piece that deals with my on again, off again fascination with Chess. I was "on" to chess around 1980-1983, and your stories bring back fond memories of the sport. And what a difference 25 years makes - analysis, computers, etc.

Rich
http://n8ux.wordpress.com/

Roger Coathup said...

80-83 was a peak time for me as well (probably started around 77/78).
It's strange how bizarre the concept of adjournments now seems (although they only died out fairly recently).

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Chess Tales by Roger Coathup: A collection of online articles about chess and chess players.