Chapters
Some people are perfectionists; they like to strive for perfection in whatever they set their mind to do and continue building their skills - often for their own pleasure. Others have a specific goal when they set themselves on a particular course. It might be earning gobs of money or becoming world-famous. Usually, it's the desire for both riches and fame that drive the majority who fall in this category. And then, there are those who are simply passionate about their pursuit with no specific end goal in mind. You might count athletes among these numbers. Their drive for performance is not clouded by the obsessiveness that haunts perfectionists. And they're certainly not training for hours each day, every day of the week because they hope to be famous. For athletes, even attaining riches is questionable; for every Usain Bolt or Michael Jordan, there are thousands of hopefuls who will never make a product endorsement or participate in a major event that could get their name out to the viewing public. Chess players fall into that category. They play for the love of the game. They study past matches to improve their strategy and, every year, sometimes by invitation, they repair to a chess tournament to see how they stack up against other players. If they do well, they go on to play in more significant tournaments. What are these invitation-only, high-profile tournaments about, then? Allow your Superprof to introduce them.
A Nod to the Chess Olympiad
the Chess Olympiad is not a tournament, per se. There is no money to be won and, although players - or, more correctly, teams of players get eliminated and there is a prize awarded to the ultimate winning team, it is not in the same league as, say, the Tata Steel Chess Tournament.
We have to talk about the Olympiad because it gave rise to the International Chess Federation - FIDE, as it is better known.
Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Tournament
An invitation-only event, this elite chess tournament takes place during the summer, in Germany. That's invitation-only save for one slot, which is permanently reserved for the winner of the Aeroflot Open, held annually in Moscow. That particularity aside, let's look at how this unlikely region in Germany came to host one of the most prestigious chess tournaments. It's 1972, New Year's Day, to be specific. Everyone in this Ruhr Valley coal mining town is either shaking off the merriment of the night before or still deep in slumber. Not Eugen Schackmann, the head of the city's publicity office. He has a mind-blowing idea: let Dortmund be where the next World Championship chess event is held. The city's reputation was... let's just say it was not good. There was football and coal mining, and there was beer. That's all everyone thought Dortmund was about. Including Dortmunders. Schackmann wanted to change all of that. He wanted to bring the king of games to Dortmund, with all of the intellectual cachet it carries, to thumb the city's nose at every other municipality that had ever looked down on their burg's hardworking, coal-dusted roots. He and his co-conspirator, Dieter Imhoff - the city's Chief Executive, no less! - ended up with egg on their faces. Reykjavik got to host the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match; the one that had lit a fire under Schackmann. He had hoped that the US-Soviet military tension of those days would heighten the chess match's appeal, making his city the place where East and West faced off over a chessboard. Despite missing out on that golden opportunity, it was hard to stop the momentum for raising the city's profile and, soon, everything was in place to host an international chess tournament the next year. And, as they say, the rest is history. Over its 40+ year history, Dortmund has hosted some of the greatest chess players of all time. A very young Kasparov, five years before he claimed the World Championship title. Jan Smejkal, the Czech International Grandmaster. Ulf Andersson, the Swedish Grandmaster. Even Bobby Fischer visited but he didn't play in a championship match. Today, the Dortmund Chess Meeting hosts several lower-level tournaments throughout the year as well as open tournaments anyone can enter.
The Linares Chess Tournament
It's hard to say what motivated Spanish business mogul Luis Rentero to finance and organise the first Linares chess tournament. Maybe he was jealous of Dortmund's success or, to be generous, hoped to recreate its success to put his city on the map. What's not in dispute is that he was absolutely mad for the game; he even owned a chess-themed hotel.
Whatever his reasons, the first official Linares Chess Tournament took place in 1978.
The Candidates' Tournament
As FIDE's influence over the chess world grew, its governors concluded that they needed some way to qualify the players before the match that would decide that year's World Chess champion. Thus, the Candidates' Tournament - sometimes called the Candidate Matches was born. Until 1993, the event was held every three years, after which FIDE set a biennial schedule. That's after a series of shakeups in the organisation, among them the famous rift, in the early 90s, that saw a rupture in the World Championship programme. Even after things were patched up, instability remained for a time but, these days, this tournament goes off without (much of) a hitch. Although the number of invited players has varied over the years, since 2013, it is capped at 8 players who face off in a double round-robin tournament. The winner then takes on the current World Champion at the ultimate chess tournament, held in the Netherlands. Find chess lessons here on Superprof.
Wijk Aan Zee
This is the most prestigious chess tournament in the world.
It started out as the Hoogovens Tournament in 1938 and was thus-called until a merger between its main sponsor, Koninklijke Hoogovens and the British Steel company in 1999 called for a name change. For the next eight years, it was called the Conus Chess Tournament. It then morphed into Tata Steel Europe, its current official name. Since its establishment in 1938, this tournament has hosted such famous chess players as:
- Anatoly Karpov
- Jan Timman
- Boris Spassky
- Bent Larsen
- Garry Kasparov
- Vasily Ivanchuk and, of course,
- Magnus Carlsen
Regular club players have a standing invitation even during the tournaments but the real draw is the Masters group. This event calls for 14 of the world's chess grandmasters to face off in a round-robin tournament; the crème de la crème of chess events. At its height of popularity, Linares may have been thought of in Wimbledon terms but that Tata Steel series of matches IS the Wimbledon of chess. So great is its draw that, in 2001, nine of the world's top ten players took part. Now, read about seven of the greatest chess matches ever played... in the Netherlands or elsewhere.
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