A total of 64 nations applied but the venue allowed for only 60 teams so FIDE rejected four on the grounds that they had missed the deadline. The four teams were: Argentina, France, Ecuador, and Venezuela. However, when Panama withdrew Argentina took their place.
Argentina’s Oscar Panno drew a record 15 games. Siegen is a small town and many competitors were housed in the surrounding area. When Korchnoi asked Panno where he was living, his reply was "in a pure field.”
Six preliminary groups of 10 teams determined the composition of the five Finals with 12 teams per group; the top two from each group played in the Final A, etc. Several unsatisfactory aspects of this system were voiced and they manifested themselves in a variety of ways.
For example, a single poor result in the preliminaries could condemn a team to a low final group. That's what happened when England's Board 1 player, Jonathan Penrose, who in his crucial last-round preliminary match, blundered a piece and fainted from the shock. Penrose had always suffered from nerves and his fainting incident resulted in his not playing any more games in the Olympiad for medical reasons.
Penrose was awarded the IM title in 1961 and was the leading British player during the 1960s and early 1970s. He won the British Championship 10 times between 1958 and 1969. He was clearly of GM strength, but did not receive the title during his active playing career. This was mainly due to his health and his choosing to remain an amateur. Penrose frequently turned down invitations to prestigious international tournaments. In 1993 he was awarded the the GM title. Chessmetrics assigns him a high rating of 2610 in 1969 which puts him number 57 in the world and in a group of distinguished GMs of the day.
Other factoids: The youngest player at the Olympiad was 11 year old Andrew Sherman who played for the Virgin Islands. Sherman was born January 12, 1959, in New York. He graduated from Hempstead High in 1974 while attending Adelphi University. He received a B.S. in History in 1980 and a J.D. in 1984 from the University of Florida.
His 1970 world record for being the youngest player ever in the Olympiads was not broken until 2008. In 1974, at the age of 15, he again represented the U.S. Virgin Islands at the Olympiad in Nice, France, and was again the youngest player.
After law school, Sherman worked for the State Attorney’s Office in Sarasota, and then ran a private practice for 14 years.
He then became a professional chess coach, teacher and organizer. For ten years, he was president of the St. Petersburg Chess Club (the oldest continually-operational-on-the-same-site chess club in the Unites States) and was also president of the Florida Chess Association. He organized two state championships, several national events and a monthly tournament for children and adults.
He was awarded the title of Life Master by the USCF in 1993. In 2003, he won the US G/10 National Championship in Houston, Texas, retaining the title in 2004. He passed away June 8, 2011 in St. Petersburg, Florida.
In round two of the preliminaries, Viktor Korchnoi overslept and lost his game by default against Spain, his only loss.
It was possible for strong teams that were assured of a qualification spot to settle for quick draws which could influence the qualification of teams below them and, as a deliberate ploy, could have assisted in assigning a strong rival to a lower final group.
Then there was the question of apartheid. Albania decided to forfeit their game against South Africa as a protest against racial segregation and so lost 4–0. Some teams and a small number of strong players did not compete at all as a protest against the participation of the South African team.
Preliminary head-to-head results were carried over to the finals, so no teams met more than once. The big game was, of course, Spassky vs. Fischer which attracted a huge crowd. Spassky conducted a powerful attack and won a nice game which seemed to be a promising sign of things to come if they ever met in a World Championship match.
The Final A results were:
1) Soviet Union (Spassky, Petrosian, Korchnoi, Polugaevsky, Smyslov, Geller)
2) Hungary (Portisch, Lengyel, Bilek, Forintos, Csom, Ribli)
3) Yugoslavia (Gligoric, Ivkov, Matulović, Matanovic, Parma, Minic
4) United States (Fischer, Reshevsky, Evans, Benko, Lombardy, Mednis)
5)Czechoslovakia (Hort, Filip, Jansa, Smejkal, Pribyl, Blatny)
6) West Germany (Unzicker, Schmid, Darga, Hecht, Mohrlok, Klundt)
7) Bulgaria (Bobotsov, Tringov, Padevsky, Popov, Radulov, Kolarov)
8) Argentina (Najdorf, Panno, Bolbochan, Quinteros, Rubinetti, Juarez
9) East Germany (Uhlmann, Malich, Liebert, Hennings, Zinn, Baumbach)
10) Romania (Gheorghiu, Ciocaltea, Ghițescu, Ungureanu, Mititelu, Reicher)
11) Canada (Yanofsky, Suttles, Vranesic, Witt, Amos, Fuster)
12) Spain (Pomar, Díez del Corral, Torán, Medina, Calvo, Bellon)
The following game is filled with tactics and has a super-nice finish. The position shown in the diagram is one that could have happened if black had tried run away with his King on move 28 instead of playing 28...exf6. In the diagrammed position black is threatened with mate on g8, so what are his defenses and how does white win against each one? It’s a good exercise in calculation.
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| Black to move. How does white answer each possible defense? |
The players: Wlodzimierz Schmidt (born April 10, 1943) is a Polish GM who has won the Polish championship in 1971, 1974, 1975, 1981 (jointly) and 1988. Douglas Hamilton (born August 15, 1941) is a Australian FM and a Correspondence IM. He was Australian champion in 1964-65 (after a play-off), 1967 and 1981-82.
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