Description
The grandmaster section of the 16th annual IBM international chess tournament was a category X event held at Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 1976. Sixteen grandmasters and top masters were invited to participate in the round robin event, including Viktor Korchnoi (2670), Fridrik Olafsson (2550), Aivars Gipslis (2535), Gyula Sax (2530), Gudmundur Sigurjonsson (2530), Bojan Kurajica (2525), Laszlo Szabo (2525), Dragoljub Velimirovic (2525), Borislav Ivkov (2520), Tony Miles (2510), Jan Hein Donner (2475), Kick Langeweg (2450), Hans Bohm (2425), Ivan Farago (2420), Hans Ree (2420), and Gert Ligterink (2400). Korchnoi’s and Miles’ shared victory was newsworthy in itself, but the real story of the tournament was Korchnoi’s defection from the Soviet Union after the tournament’s completion. During the award ceremony, Korchnoi asked his colleague and fellow co-winner Miles how to write “asylum” and then surrendered himself to the Dutch embassy the following day. In the wake of Korchnoi’s action the Soviet Union responded publicly by boycotting any events in which Korchnoi was invited to take part. This would also add to the incredibly tense atmosphere in the following two world championships in which Korchnoi would face the Soviet World Champion Anatoli Karpov.
Condition: Very Good. Algebraic notation.
36 pages with diagrams, tables, photographs and drawings. Bound in original stapled wrappers. Commentary by Jules Welling. First edition.
