Also in January, North Vietnam launched the bloody Tet Offensive. The coordinated attack by 85,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese targeted 36 major cities and towns in South Vietnam and caught the US military completely by surprise.
I remember this well because I had just gotten out of the military five months earlier and began receiving a letter every month promising me a promotion if I would return to military service. Meanwhile, I was watching the nightly news reports telling us how badly things were going in Vietnam and watching the body count pile up. I knew why they wanted be back. No thanks! As it turned out, the Tet Offensive was the beginning of the end of US involvement in the Vietnam War.
On April 4th, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as he was standing on the second floor balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Just two months later Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
On a lighter note, in 1968 a movie entitled The Thomas Crown Affair was released that starred Steve McQueen as Thomas Crown. Crown staged a two million dollar bank heist and when he invited Vicki Anderson (played by Faye Dunaway), an insurance investigator who suspects that Crown was the brains behind the bank job, to his mansion where she saw a fancy chess set.
They ended up playing a game and by the 12th move they had reached a position that occurred in the game Zeissl-Walthoffen, Vienna 1898, a Ruy Lopez, Schliemann variation. In was a very seductive scene lasting about 7 minutes and ends with Crown saying, "Let's play something else" and the rest is up to your imagination.
One of the music scores for this scene was "The Chess Game," composed and conducted by Michel Legrand. The chess scene was spoofed in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.
In December, Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon.
The year 1968 saw several major tournaments taking place. There was the Olympiad in Lugano, won by the Soviet Union, of course. In Vinvovci, Yugoslavia Bobby Fischer scored +9 -0 =4 to finish in first place two points ahead of Hort and Matulovic who tied for second.
Palma de Mallorca was the strongest tournament in 1968. It featured the World Champion Petrosian, his challenger Spassky, and Korchnoi, who had just lost to Spassky in the Candidates final match. Larsen, who had lost to Spassky in the Candidates Semifinal was there as was Gligoric, who had lost to Tal in the quarterfinal. In the tournament Korchnoi went undefeated and finished first ahead of Larsen and Spassky (tied). The World Champion finished 4th.
Unbeknownst to most of the world, in Kislovodsk, a spa city in southwestern Russia, there was a chess tournament that received no publicity. The final standings were:
1) Efim Geller 10.0
2-3) Evgeni Vasiukov and Bukhuti Gurgenidze 9.0
4) Eduard Gufeld 8.5
5-6) David Bronstein and Abraham Khasin 8.0
7-8) Felix Ignatiev and Victor Ciocaltea 7.0
9-10) Leonid Shamkovich and Milorad Knezevic 7.0
11) Karoly Honfi 6.0
12-13) Vladimir Simagin and Stanimir Nikolic 5.0
14) Ivo Ryc 3.5
15) Petar Orev 3.0
The following game is a good example of the Gurgenidze Variation by its inventor, Bukhuti Gurgenidze (November 13, 1933 – May 24, 2008). A geologist by profession he was born in the small town of Surami in Georgia and was Georgian Champion many times; he also played in nine USSR Championships.
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| Gurgenidze |
Gurgenidze was a trainer to several women GMs in the Soviet Union, most notably former women's world champion Nona Gaprindashvili and her successor, Maia Chiburdanidze. He also worked with two of Chiburdanidze’s leading challengers, Nana Ioseliani and Nana Alexandria. During the 1990s, Gurgenidze was vice-president of the Georgian chess federation.
In the following game Gurgenidze played his system in the Modern Defense (or Robatsch Defense as it is called in Modern Chess Openings 14th edition) against Hungarian IM Karoly Honfi (October 25, 1930 - August 14, 1996). Honfi was awarded the GM title shortly after his death.
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| Honfi |
The Gurgenidze Variation is a very solid system where black aims to hold things on the K-side and gradually develop Q-side counterplay which is exactly what happens in this game.
There are a number of books available on this slippery defense (Pirc and Modern) claiming it can be played by black against absolutely any white opening system and it is an ambitious, counterattacking weapon, favored by dynamic players. While this is true, very often the implication is that as a “system” it doesn’t require a lot of preparation, which is not true.
As GM Alex Yermolinsky pointed out, white has a wide range of options and what he decides to do will depend on his own preferred opening repertoire. As a result, what black does to meet white’s moves is going to require a lot of knowledge of different setups. Only then can black take advantage of the defense’s flexibility.
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