In chess Harlow Daly must have set some kind of record when he won the Maine championship at the age of 85. It was the year IM David Levy made a $3,000 ($22-23, 000 in today’s currency) bet that no chess computer would beat him in 10 years. He won the bet.
Larry Evans won the US championship and Bent Larsen scored 11-1 to win the US Open. Hans Berliner won the 5th world correspondence championship. Julio Kaplan of Puerto Rico won the world junior championship. Bobby Fischer took 1st place at Nathanya, Israel.
Fischer showed up in Lugano to play for the US team in the Olympiad, but because of the poor lighting in the tournament hall, he demanded that the organizers allow him to play his games in a private room; when they refused, Booby, with no regard for the U.S. team, refused to play and left town.
On September 25th, GM Vladimir Simagin (born 1919) died of a heart attack at the age of 49 just a few hours before he was scheduled to play in a tournament at Kislovodsk. On October 2nd, artist and sculptor Marcel Duchamp (born 1887) died in Neuilly, France at the age of 81. He had played in the French Championships and also in the Olympiads 1928-1933. Just a few weeks later, on October 26th, IM Stefan Erdelyi (born 1905) died in Romania at the age if 62. He was Romanian champion in 1931, 1934 and 1949. At the end of the year, on December 31st, Carl Ahues (born 1883) died in Hamburg at the age of 85. He was German champion in 1929.
Wolfgang Walther Pietzsch (December 21, 1930 - December 29, 1996) was, in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the strongest GMs in East Germany (aka the German Democratic Republic).
In 1961 he became an IM and was awarded the GM title in 1966. His best rating came in May of 1966 when he topped out at 2611.
Pietzsch learned to play chess from his father and joined his high school chess club. After graduating from high school, he studied mathematics and physics in Leipzig. Besides chess, his hobbies were filming and photography.
From 1955 to 1961 he worked as a teacher at the Dr. Wilhelm Kulz School in Grimma (now the St. Augustin Gymnasium), then in Taucha and later as a teacher in vocational and high school education at the business school of the VEB Galvanotechnik Leipzig. During the last years before retirement he also worked as a lecturer at a Leipzig University of Applied Sciences.
As an 18-year-old, Pietzsch first became champion of the Soviet occupation zone in Bad Klosterlausnitz in 1949 and a little later shared first place at the tournament in Grossrohrsdorf with Lothar Schmid.
Pietzsch won the East German championship three times (1959, 1962 and 1967) and represented East Germany at the Chess Olympiads in 1952, 1958, 1960, 1962, 1966 and 1968.
In the late 1960s, Pietzsch retired from competitive play although he continued to play at the local club until the 1980s. Pietzsch also enjoyed playing simultaneous displays and solving chess problems.
Beginning in 1974, the East German government withdrew its support of chess as it concentrated on track and field. As a result, its chess teams did not take part in the Olympiads and with the exception of Wolfgang Uhlmann, players were not allowed to take part in the Zonal or Interzonal tournaments.
Lost in all the hubbub of 1968 was the 6th Rubinstein memorial held in Polanica Zdroj, a spa town in south western Poland. The tournament was won easily by Smyslov despite the fact that he lost one game (to Pietzsch) while second place finisher Lubomir Kavalek was undefeated.
Final Standings
1) Smyslov 11.5
2) Kavalek 10.5
3-5) Doda, Padevsky and Simagin 9.0
6) Jansa 8.5
7-8) Adamski and Schmidt 8.0
9) Pietzsch 7.5
10-11) Kostro and Soos 7.0
12-13) Bilek and Forintos 6.5
14) Golz 5.0
15) Grabczewski 4.0
16) Bednarski 3.0
A word about the opening in this game. The London System, Torre Attack and the Colle are decent openings, but don't get hoodwinked into thinking you don't need to put in some effort in order to learn how to play them well. Believe me, there are plenty of authors out there who will try to trick you by claiming these openings are "systems" that you can play regardless of what your opponent plays. The implication often is that you don’t need to put in any effort, just learn the “system.”
But, take a look at these books and you’ll see a slew of chapters like how to play the opening against setups such as the Q-Indian, Gruenfeld, K-Indian, Dutch, Benoni plus miscellaneous lines. These books divided into chapters like this because white has to alter his strategy depending on what setup black chooses and if that's the case then readers are going to have to put some effort into learning how to correctly play the opening...same as the Ruy Lopez, Sicilian, or any other opening you can think of.
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