After joining the military out of high school, chess came to an end. Even after the military, working at a job that required putting in what felt like a thousand hours a week left no time. Finally, after a 12-year hiatus and having gotten a less demanding job I took it up again. In spite of their being illegal it was apparent that a lot of people were using engines. It was no problem at first, but eventually engines got too strong and it was time to throw in the towel.
In order to guide engines you need to have patience...lots of it to do research and experimenting and I just don’t care to do all that. As they say, those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. I might add, those who can do neither blog! Read the article on modern correspondence chess at ChessBase.
Following the foundation of the International Correspondence Chess Union in Berlin in 1928 the idea of a Correspondence Championship was discussed for the first time. Alekhine, who played a lot of correspondence chess in his early days, was a driving force to see the realization of a Correspondence Championship.
It wasn’t until 1936 that an IFSB conference decided to set up a committee to bring the idea of a CC champion into fruition. Plans struck a snag with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, but for some reason it took until 1947 for the preliminaries to get started.
There were 78 participants from 22 countries in 11 preliminary groups. The finals with 15 players started in 1950 and finished in 1953. It was won by Cecil Purdy of Australia.
The second championship (1956-1959) was won by Vyacheslav Ragozin of the Soviet Union. The third (1959-1962) by Albrec O'Kelly of Belgium and the fourth (1962-1965) by Vladimir Zagorovsky of the Soviet Union.
Zagorovsky (June 29, 1925 – November 6, 1994) was a leading Russian correspondence GM who was also a fairly strong OTB player as he proved by winning the 1952 Moscow City Championship. The Moscow City Championship in that era had been won by such players as Yuri Averbakh, Tigran Petrosian, David Bronstein, Evgeni Vasiukov and Vladimir Simagin, so it was a tough tournament...tougher even than some international tournaments.
In the July 1972 FIDE rating list he had an over the board rating of 2370. Zagororovsky also authored Romantic Chess Openings. He was a master when he took up postal play in the 1950s and continued to play at the highest level up until his death, competing in five consecutive world championships finals with good results in each. He also led the USSR team to Olympad success and played in numerous invitational GM tournaments.
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Zagorovsky has played
30...Rc7-h7.
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The Fifth World Correspondence Chess Championship began on April 1, 1965 and ended three years later and was famously won by the only American in the field, Hans Berliner. His victory over the Soviet Union’s Yakov Estrin, a well known theorist of the Two Knights' Defense, is one of the most memorable correspondence game ever played when Berliner beat Estrin’s Two Knights Defense.
The tournament wasn’t even close; Berliner scored +12 -0 =4 and his score of 14-2 put him a whopping three points ahead of Jaroslav Hybl and Karel Husak who scored 11-5. Zagorovsky and Heinz De Carbonnel tied for 4th and 5th places with 10-6.
5th CC World Ch Final 1965
1) Berliner 14.0
2-3) Hybl and Husak 11.0
4-5) Zagorovsky and De Carbonnel 10.0
6) Abramson 9.5
7-8) Endzelins and Nielsen 9.0
9-11) J. Richter, Rokhlin and Altshuler 7.5
12) Stern 7.0
13) Estrin 6.0
14) Messere 5.5
15) Ericson 5.0
16) Nyman 4.0
17) Borisenko 2.5
Borisenko withdrew midway through the tournament and his unfinished games were adjudicated.
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