Korchnoi's Candidate Matches 1977. Some Games I Remember.

Games come into my head at strange times and for no obvious reason. This week I recalled one from the 1977 Candidates Match between Korchnoi and Spassky. (Perhaps it came to mind because of the fuss made of someone playing the French Defence in a top level match, as if such a thing was unheard of!!)

I will give that game at the end, as my featured game, along with others from Korchnoi's three Candidates Matches which lead to the famous 'Battle of Baguio' title match.

It's amazing to think that this all happened in my 'chess youth'. Very nearly half a century ago!

There will be some kids reading this who's parents were not even born back then!

I remember it all like it was yesterday, such was the excitement and tension it all generated. You even got nervous grabbing the newspapers in the morning to read what had happened.

The pressures on the players was such that four highly experienced Grandmasters found it impossible to play properly, and the games saw a mass of otherwise inexplicable blunders.

So, for those who don't know the course of events, here's a little introduction. 

Korchnoi defected from the USSR, and the Soviets denounced him, and refused to play against him in any non FIDE events. Fighting for the title he was now in the same sort of position as Fischer had been, but with more hatred and desperation from the Soviet side. Indeed, it has more recently been confirmed that the Kremlin had ordered his murder should he become World Champion.

His quarter final opponent was the ex-champion Tigran Petrosian. The famous 'Match of Hate'.

(I have a little souvenir of the match - a badge sent to me by a friend in Moscow, which I use as a tiepin! )

Let's give some of what Korchnoi had to say in his article 'My First Year in the West'.

''...it is easy to understand my feelings when I learned that my first opponent on the path to the chess crown would be none other than Petrosian, the man who had played such a sinister role in my destiny, having been the driving force behind my expulsion from the Soviet Union ....

The very idea of sharing a table with him was repugnant, particularly since I was the obvious underdog....

I secretly hoped that the match would not take place ...Whatever I knew of Petrosian suggested that he was equally unwilling to meet me ...

Petroian arrived in Il-Ciocco accompanied by a retinue of four seemingly chosen for the mission on the basis of their animosity towards me: Petrosian's wife, Geller, and Averbakh. From this tableau of hatred only Baturinsky was missing .....

Against this background of trusted soviet henchmen, Zaitsev, the fourth assistant, cut a strange figure; an 'intellectual for sale'. I saw the group as a punitive expedition despatched to subdue a fugitive criminal.......

The match was no sooner over than I was in the grip of a strange desire: I was yearning for normal chess play, not a war of nerves!''

This is the game that I remember most from the match - it illustrates the stresses the players were under.

''For over two decades I had been on friendly terms with Lev Polugaevsky. But last year the leaders of the Soviet Chess Federation wrote a letter in an attempt to deprive me of the chance to participate in the candidates matches. Polugaevsky signed that insidious letter, and I was in no mood to play with him - or see him for that matter. Polugaevsky reciprocated in kind.'' Korchnoi.

A quick picture of the young Korchnoi - against Taimanov from the 1951Tchigorin Memorial in Leningrad.

In the final Korchnoi was up against a revitalised Boris Spassky.

He was in the best shape he had been in sine the Fischer match in my view. In the semi finals he had on a wonderful and hard fought match against Portisch, and then played two 'warm up' matches, against Kavalek and Timman, as I recall. 

However, against Korchnoi, he seemed to fall victim to all of the pressures and behaved in a very 'unSpasskylike' way. He spent most of the games away from the board - studying the positions on the demo board. At one point he turned up in goggles, if I remember rightly, which is simply bizarre. The match was equally strange. Korchnoi simply murdered him in the first half - at one point he was 5 games ahead ( yes, back then Candidates matches were longer than title matches are these days) - and then he collapsed under the pressures and Spassky won 4 games in a row!!

One example I recall is this one, which features a most rediculous pair of blunders.

In amongst all the nonsense Korchnoi did manage to play one of the greatest games of his long career which made a huge impression on us all. The wonderful Jon Speelman recalled it in one of his articles not so long ago. In particular, one move caught everyone's imagination.

So to the game which set me off down memory lane. It was one of the very first Grandmaster games which I attempted to annotate for publication. At the time the chess was way over my head, but I always enjoyed putting in the hard analytical work and trying to make sense of games that I didn't understand.