The Making of a Super tournament.

Who could have imagined that the strongest and richest chess tournament up to that point in time would be the result of a joint venture among an art gallery owner, a film director and a U.S. chess champion?

In 1977 Lubosh Kavalek (who just passed away on Jan. 18, 2021), a former Czech champion and at that time a former and future (1978) US champion, had an idea to establish a professional chess circuit similar to that of other sports with commensurate prize funds.  He ran his idea by other chess masters who were supportive of it - at least vocally.  He went outside of the chess circle and enlisted two of his friends, film director Ivan Passer whom he knew from Czechoslovakia and Michael Zivian, owner of the  Michael Zivian Gallery on 315 E. 62nd St., NY (in 1979 he would pay $800,000 for and exhibit Andy Warhol's Space Fruit: Still Lifes series).  Zivian was also a lawyer and an erstwhile film producer.   
Together they formed a corporation called "Chess Tourn, Inc."

The first step was to create a model tournament to prove the viability of the idea.  Fortunately, Ivan Passer and another director who immigrated from Czechoslovakia, Milos Forman, provided experience and advice in finding sponsors and in weathering the inevitable frustrations and setbacks.

Lubosh wrote: "'You need a lot of patience and good nerves,' Milos told me. 'A lot of your time is wasted on negotiations, business deals. You need luck. By the time you start to make the movie, there is not usually much energy left.' - Later I would often recall these words."

The first order of business was to line up the players. In order to more or less ensure their availability  if the tournament came to be, Chess Tourn, Inc. set a deadline of Dec. 15 to let the players know if the tournament was a go. Once the deadline was reached and  it was decided the tournament would indeed take place, every player was guaranteed $2000 if the plans changed and tournament was cancelled. 

The idea of using Montreal Canada had arisen about during the Olympiad played in Buenos Aires October-November 1978.  The partners visited the city and were offered the stadium where the Summer Olympics had been held in 1976. But Montreal offered no money.  There was a verbal agreement of $90,000 but there had been other such offers that fell through when push came to shove. So, the partners used their own funds to make the $2000 guarantee to keep the project alive until adequate funding could be arranged.  In the meantime a novel approach to the tournament organization was applied: rather than set the terms to which the players would have to agree to abide, the players were asked what they wanted and every effort was expended to make those things happen.

After many promises made and many promises broken while navigating the negotiating waters where everyone wanted a piece of the profits, the organizers happened upon a man named Roger Lemelin, publisher on the Montreal La Presse newspaper.

Roger Lemelin

They had found a place in the U.S. that offered a playing hall, a resort hotel and  30 free rooms and board  but Lemelin, a chess enthusiast who said that wherever he traveled he always sought out a chess club, suddenly offered $75,000 (Canadian), which, coupled with the city's offer to use the Olympic Stadium, made the choice clear.

Upon inspection of the site, instead of the 66,000 seat overkill that the Olympic Stadium provided, they instead went with the Swiss-built Quebec Pavilion from the 1967 Expo, turned "Man and His World" exhibit, as the playing hall.  Lemelin then informed them that the $75,000 had been augmented to $110,000 (Canadian). Everything was turning up roses.

The 400 seat capacity Quebec Pavilion /  Playing Hall
on the 

The tournament Director was Svetozar Gligoric with FM Kevin O'Connell, international arbiter and chess author, as his assistant TD.  This was Gligoric's first venture into this chess role. Gligoric and O'Connell also performed other duties.  O'Connell produced a daily bulletin containing all the games played that day and gave a free copy to each members of the International Association of Chess Journalists (AIPE). Gligoric started  annotating the games verbally while O'Connell wrote them down and included them in the bulletin. Since this turned out to be an all-night job, some of the players began offering their own annotations. Gligoric also did double-duty as the correspondent for the Yugoslav media. 

Aleksanr Roshal, chess journalist, co-founder (1968) and editor of the reinstituted weekly magazine 64 (Petrosian was the other co-founder and first editor, but was removed after losing to Korchnoi in the semi-quarter final candidates match in 1977.  Roshal was at the tournament in his capacity as as special correspondent for the newspaper Sovyetsky Sport.

Roshal, along with Victor Chepizhny, a 2 time gold medalist a one time sliver medalist and a one time bronze medalist in the World Championship of Chess Composition in the first 5 competitions, wrote the Soviet tournament book.

Roshal, writing from his daily diary notes, started the book off with:  "The Meridien Hotel extends over a full block in the centre of Montreal."  The Hotel Le Meridien, where the players stayed, was about 5 miles from the playing site located on l'Île Notre-Dame in the St. Lawrence River.

Hotel Le Meridien

The original name for this tournament was World Cup. This was lengthened to The World Chess Challenge Cup tournament. Finally, because of its venue, it became commonly called The Man and His World Chess Challenge Cup tournament - in the English speaking west. 
The Soviets called it Шахматный турнир звезд or The Chess Tournament of the Stars.
The Québécois called it Le Grand Tournoi international d'échecs Terre des Hommes.

Even the emblematic symbol for the tournament was derived from the Expo 67
The chess world joining hands.

The melding of the past, both the 1967 Expo and the 1976 Olympics with this new coup seemed both intentional and appropriate.

Lubosh Kavalek

With an average rating of 2622 this was the first category XV tournament in chess history.  Yet the second strongest player by virtue of having just participated in a world championship bout wasn't invited:

Robert Byrne —NY Times May 2, 1979 
"MONTREAL — The richest tournament in chess history, the Man and his World Challenge Cup, has begun here, and the runner‐up in last summer's world championship, Viktor Korchnoi, is the only one of the world's best players who is not present. Mr. Korchnoi, a Soviet defector now living in Switzerland, was not Invited by the tournament's organizers because the Soviet Union has refused to permit its players to participate in matches that include him. It made an exception for the world championship, which Mr. Korchnoi lost to Anatoly Karpov of the Soviet Union."

Karpov would later claim that this wasn't the case. But but less than a month earlier (March 25 to April 4) Korchnoi played in Louis D. Statham's Lone Pine Master-Plus tournament and for the first time since it went international in 1976, no Soviets participated. In fact, Isaac Kashdan, who organized the tournament every year had this telegram exchange with "Cuddles" Baturinsky after being assured two Soviet players would be participating, making Karpov who claimed he was on the committee that decides such thing seem less than honest:

The three Soviet contestants who did participate in Montreal were world champions, present or past, and all the others were national champions in their respective countries.

Below are the players and their ratings at the time.  

Since the sponsor owned a newspaper, the event was highly publicized.  Roshal wrote: "[The chess players] successfully rivaled the highly popular professionals of the National Hockey League, Very soon, the local journalists began to talk about the Montreal idol Guy Lefler having to compete not only with Trotier from 'New York Islanders' for the ice puck, but also with Karpov from Russia for the number of photographs in the press."

Unfortunately, the archives of La Press aren't accessible to me and the only clippings I found are:

from La Press

Le Devoir, March 16,1979
(click image for full size)

Le Quotidien,  March 21, 1979
(Click image for full size)

The tournament began on Tuesday, April 10 and lasted until Monday, May 7.
More than 42% of the games were decisive, a rather high percentage in master tournaments. Mikhail Tal and Anatoly Karpov shared first place-- Karpov had the most wins but Tal had no loses.

Besides the above prizes (even last place received $4,000 (equivalent to about $13,000 in 2021) there was also a $1000 Brilliancy Prize. It was shared by Tal (for his win over Spassky) and by Larsen (for his win over Karpov). 

The co-winners, Karpov and Tal

An English version of A. Roshal's and V. I. Chepizhny's book, translated by Kenneth P. Neat, is also available (and highly recommended by your truly).  It's a somewhat unusual tournament book: partly a very descriptive diary with a grand inside peek at the everyday occurrences and partly a fully annotated (by the players themselves) collection of games played. 

Since Roshal was Soviet and writing for a Soviet audience, his focus was on Karpov, but what he had to say is still interesting. Roshal stressed how all the players got along so well and how there were no 'incidents.' Roshal also included log interviews with Karpov and Tal and they reiterated that sentiment --along with a dig on Korchnoi (and, in Tal's case, on Henrique Mecking too). This dwelling on fellowship seems to have that as it's agenda (but that's just my unsolicited opinion). 

A few Alexandr Roshal tidbits:

Roshal mentions how the organizers were worried that since the Quebec Pavilion was on a river island it might not be well attended but that, as it turned out, there was a packed house every day. 

There was one incident there both Tal and Karpov who were riding with Roshal both forgot their name tags. The guard refused to let them in until Roshal vouched from them. 

Even the foyer was fascinating enough to rate a description:

I...have never seen such a large number of chess publications at any one time. True , the reservation must be made that published abroad are a considerable number of aids of the type 'How to win' , written by completely incompetent authors, but there is also an abundance of substantial (and expensive) books, including Chess Informants and collections of game from major events and by top grandmasters. It was suggested to Tal that he buy (at a discount!) a collection of his ow games , while Karpov was constantly being asked to autograph books devoted to him. On display were numerous articles so sought after by chess players : clocks, chess sets of every possible size - traveling, pocket, or for tournaments - scorebooks for recording games, transfers of chess pieces for diagrams - the list is endless! In the foyer we are offered a simple problem to solve, so as to join in a simultaneous display. You can also do battle with a chess computer, and you yourself can switch the program to any one of the six levels of play of this, as yet, not very clever machines. In the foyer there are also TV monitors, to remind those who have come out to exchange opinions or simply to smoke, of the most interesting positions from the game s still in progress on the stage.

"Among the other organizers, the 'Tournament of Stars' was financed by the well known tobacco firm 'Rothmans', which was not sparing in the advertisement of its products, and which lavishly donated them to the players. But out of the ten participants in the tournament, only two are genuine (it would be more correct to say inveterate) smokers : Kavalek and Tal."

"The Montreal newspapers do not lose sight of the World Champion even outside the tournament hall . They gave a detailed account of how, at the wheel of a 'Corvette ' sports car, he completed lap after lap at an auto-track not far from the Quebec pavilion. But meanwhile, at the chess tournament, the second lap was just beginning . . ."

"From the morning of 29th April, all the players had been warned that on this Sunday in Canada all clocks are altered by one hour, so that they would have to arrive in the tournament hall an hour earlier than usual. But even so, for the 14th round Karpov and Tal were slightly late : they were delayed in their hotel by the effusive greetings of Mona Karff, seven time USA Lady Chess Champion.

"Edward Lasker , a close friend of the legendary Emanuel, flew in for a day from New York, although he is already 93 years old. This most elderly of distinguished chess players animatedly - his eyes wee simply sparkling, and he would very energetically slap his companion on the back - told of his friendship not only with World Champions, but also with other prominent people : Albert Einstein, Sergey Prokofiev
. . . Edward Lasker emphasized that Soviet grandmasters, for whom he had always had the greatest respect, were also at the 'Tournament of Stars' confirming their very high class ."

"In the 17th, penultimate, round of the 'Tournament of Stars' my neighbour was Miguel Quinteros. This grandmaster gets on very we ll with Karpov, but he and Ljubojevic have long been firm friends. Miguel and Ljuba, two young and very likeable lads, once visited the Philippines for the first time, and together thought of getting married there to local beauties. But this plan was fulfilled only by Quinteros : he returned to Manila two years later, when his chosen one had at last reached the age of 17, and she became his companion for life. Mrs Quinteros (and one of her sisters, incidentally, was 'Miss Universe') speaks Serbian quite well - together with her husband she has stayed in Yugoslavia, the land of their friend Ljubojevic . . ."

Whatever happened to "Chess Tourn, Inc." is anybody's guess but there were no more World Cup tournaments as Kavalek envisioned. 

All the games can be found here: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chesscollection?cid=1016901 

this should be in a blog! very cool!

Thanks for reading it in the forums.

Thank you @batgirl!

Thanks....fantastic post! Larsen played like Karpov and beat Karpov...with Black! How cool is that?

I should read this book.

Interesting, and as usual we learn a lot of historical "side facts" from you - thanks!

(Brings back souvenirs to me from when I organized international scientific conferences with participants from all over the world, including Russia, Korea, Japan, China... one over 20 years ago, when no-one had a cell phone yet - unimaginable today! 😅)

PS: Archives of "La Presse" are online, the tournament with photo of participants is on p.1 of the edition from April 11, 1979 (and additional articles on E1 and J1).

Thanks, you must have worked really hard on this!

Great story, Sarah, thanks a lot!

I've just found your work a few days ago Batgirl and I haven't stopped reading since. You bring *so* much to the chess community here. Thank you.

and thank you.

It's interesting that Karpov lost his only game to Larsen who came in last place. 

That's the English translation of Roshal's book. It really a great tournament book.

I hear they were brilliant

Thank you so much.

Here's the image from that La Press issue (for everyone to enjoy). click the image for a full size.

I work hard on everything.  

I hope you find some things worthwhile.

Merci beaucoup, Terje!

Pardon my French.

So many Laskers... 

Thank you.