Oscar R. Panno (born March 17, 1935 in Buenos Aires) is a living legend in Argentina. He was the first top world class player born in South America and he won the 2nd World Junior Championship in 1953, ahead of such future luminaries as Borislav Ivkov, Bent Larsen and Fridrik Olafsson. He also won the championship of Argentina in 1953.
Panno became a GM at the age of twenty and Chessmetrics estimates that he was as high as 18th in the world in late 1955. Panno had numerous international successes between 1954 and 1995 which included the candidate tournaments Gothenburg Interzonal (1955) and Portoroz (1958). He qualified for Sousse (1967) but could not attend due to work commitments.
Other international events included Palma de Mallorca (1970), Petropolis (1973) and Manila (1976). He represented Argentina in 11 world Olympiads. His personal record in those events is +51 -13 =87.
He won or achieved good results in numerous international tournaments including Caracas, 1970, behind Kavalek and Stein, but in front of a young Anatoly Karpov. Buenos Aires, 1970, 3rd place, behind Fischer and Tukmakov and Lone Pine tournament, 1977, where he shared first place with the Russian Balashov, among others.
Panno holds the record for the shortest game on record for his one move loss to Bobby Fischer at Palma de Mallorca in 1970. The games of the last round were scheduled for 4:00 PM Saturday, but Fischer and Reshevsky were allowed to start at 7:00 PM for religious reasons. Panno felt this was particularly unfair in the last round because some players might have an advantage from knowing the results of earlier games. Panno was reluctant to play at that hour, but Fischer urged him to do so. Panno did show up and when Fischer played 1.d4, Panno resigned. Fischer's win was one of twenty straight games he won in a 1970-71 streak.
Born in Buenos Aires, Panno learned chess at the age of seven when his father bought him and his brother a bunch of board games to keep them from going out and playing on the street so much. It was a stroke o fluck that Panno found his way into the River Plate Athletic Club at the age of 12 along with his older brother, Caesar. They went their on the advice of their pediatrician who had recommended swimming. But, while wandering around the club, they entered the chess room, and it was the beginning of a long association with chess for both boys. Both were soon seen participating in children's tournaments, along with another boy who would soon be friends with both, an amateur named Aldo Salerno.
The brothers read chess articles Roberto Grau wrote for Leoplan Magazine. Grau had been a mainstay at the club until his death in 1944. During a time that master Alfredo Esposito was showing and commenting on a game of Capablanca and he would stop and ask, "What do you think Capablanca played at this time?"
There was deep silence in the auditorium of 12 or 15 people of all ages and then the right answers would come from the twelve-year-old Panno. Esposito asked the boy if he had ever seen the game to which Panno replied that it was the first time he had ever seen it. Esposito told him, "So if you can find Capablanca's moves so easily, I think a great future awaits you in chess."
A few months after this incident the club named Grau's successor for the position of chess teacher, Julio Bolbochan, who soon captivated everyone with his deep knowledge, teaching ability and geniality. Panno hit it off well with Bolbochan and every week they would go over Panno's games discussing points he didn't understand.
Panno's adolescence was spent at the club where on Saturdays, there were the classes of Bolbochan and blitz games with friends. Then on Sundays the two brothers, along with their friend Aldo Salerno, would attend the soccer games at the club.
Under Julio Bolbochán, Panno's rise was meteoric. In 1953, at the age of 18, he won three titles. He was the Argentine champion, the champion of the Argentine Chess Club and the World Junior Champion. Along with the latter title came the title of International Master. Until that time, the only Latin American chess player to have obtained a world championship was Capablanca.
The successes continued: He won three Argentine championships (1953, 1985 and 1992) and was runner up four times (1958, 1967, 1975 and 1993).
In 1954 he finished first in the South American Zonal contested in Mar del Plata. At the Gothenburg Interzonal in 1955 where he finished third behind Bronstein and Keres. If he had managed to beat Bronstein in their individual game, he and Bronstein would have tied for first.Also, if Keres had beaten Bronstein in their individual game, Keres would have won the tournament. The tournament earned Panno the GM title.
Locals thought they had a future world champion in the 20 year old Panno, but he had other plans. Her had decided to finish his engineering studies and pursue that profession. In those days, unlike decades later, the idea of someone becoming a professional chess player was pretty much out of the question.
There was a conflict between his chess and his university studies when in 1958, Panno claimed his recent successes exempted him from playing in the preliminaries for the upcoming Argentine championship and besides, he needed to have time for his college studies. His request received a resounding negative so Panno made the decision to withdraw from all competition until he had achieved his civil engineering degree.
As a result, from late 1958 to the summer of 1962, he did not participate in any tournaments. And, after he returned to chess, people were disappointed because it was clear that chess had ceased to be his main priority.
He began working as an engineer in a major company and they were soon assigning him major projects. Among them were the some of the well known bridges and viaducts in Buenos Aires. Panno also taught at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Buenos Aires. He soon married a young Dutch woman and they soon had three children.
As a result of his work, he began to decline participation in tournaments that involved traveling far from Buenos Aires, unless they coincided with his vacations. When he did play in a local tournaments, it was after a tiring work day.
For the Havana Olympics in 1966, a lot of hoops had to be jumped trough in order for Panno to get permission to play, but it was asking too much to get even more time off work for his participation in the Interzonal in Tunisia in 1967, so he had to decline. For information on what life was like in Argentina in the sixties visit HERE and HERE.
In the early 1970s, his situation changed. Panno resigned from the company, and with a partner, established his own engineering company that was dedicated to the construction of infrastructure works such as water networks, sewers and pavement for the city of Buenos Aires. Now he no longer had to apply for permission to play tournaments, because he had become his own boss.
Another consequence of Panno's new job was that from March 1973 he was able to accept the position of Professor of Chess at the chess club. Panno thus became a member of a very prestigious group of club teachers such as Roberto Grau, Julio Bolbochan and Raúl Sanguineti.
Panno was Korchnoi's second in the world title match against Karpov, in Baguío 1978. In the early 1980s, Panno had to deal with a severe a blow to his business. There was a major financial crisis in which the economics minister in Argentina abruptly cut state procurement for an indefinite period. As a result, Panno was out of business and had to find something else.
That something else was chess and he become a professional chess player with two potential sources of income: his prizes and his teaching income. In addition to the River Club he added several others. Also, between August 1998 and March 1999 he published Chess with Panno, a magazine sold at newsstands.
As a teacher, Panno was very successful. Among his students were a lot of well known young players including WGM Claudia Amura, the best woman chess woman in Argentine history. Even with his great success as a teacher, Panno pointed out that the goal of his teaching was not to produce Masters...it was to teach his students how to make decisions in life.
The names of most of Panno's students wouldn't be familiar, but Argentina has a long history of producing strong, but little known players. In the book of his best games, Bent Larsen wrote that when he went to Mar del Plata in 1958, he was warned by many players that European masters could get a nasty surprise when coming up against little known Argentinian players.
A word about the opening in this game, a King's Indian Attack. I have often seen openings like the KIA and the Torre Attack recommended as "systems" where white can play them against any black defense.
That's true, but it's often with the suggestion that you can play the same moves no matter what black plays so you don't need to put much effort into studying opening lines. You just play the system. That's simply not true.
To play correctly, you must vary your strategy as white (there I said the "S" word, strategy) according to black's setup. In the King's Indian Attack black can setup formations resembling the Sicilian, the French, the Caro-Kann, he can play ...d5 and ...Bg4 or ...Bf5, a King's Indian Defense Reversed or even some other defensive setups and you need to know how to correctly meet each one. That all requires some study.
From about move 34 until move 43 the two players did a lot of wood shifting and there’s not much point in giving better moves suggest by Stockfish. Apparently the maneuvers were influenced by the time control, whatever that was. It all lead up to Panno’s knockout punch at move 43.
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