Korchnoi Year by Year - by Hans Renette & Tibor Karolyi

About the Book

The second volume of Elk and Ruby's treatise on Viktor Korchnoi, penned by FM Hans Renette and IM Tibor Karolyi, covers the period 1969-1980.

Book Synopsis

***Short-listed for the English Chess Federation 2024 Book of the Year Prize!!***

The second volume of Elk and Ruby's treatise on Viktor Korchnoi, penned by FM Hans Renette and IM Tibor Karolyi, covers the period 1969-1980. This encompasses Korchnoi's famous world championship fight with Karpov at Baguio City in 1978, his candidates final matches against Karpov in 1974 and Hubner in 1980, as well as the related candidates cycles and major tournament performances. Much biographical colour is supplied on his life and character, with this period including his defection from the Soviet Union to the West in 1976. Like in Volume I, original material is provided from interviews with key protagonists and their relatives, while sources in Russian, German, Dutch and Hungarian as well as English are used to paint the most comprehensive portrait of Korchnoi available.

140 games and fragments are analysed in detail in this work. As well as Karpov and Hubner, opponents include Fischer, Spassky, Petrosian, Smyslov, Portisch, Geller, Najdorf, Timman, Larsen, Mecking, Sosonko, Andersson, Ljubojevic, Polugaevsky, Nunn, and Miles among others. Many new discoveries are made in the analysis. In particular, the authors identify that Korchnoi worked hard to improve his endgame ability significantly during the time that he was boycotted in tournaments by the Soviets, which is most surprising given that he was in his mid-forties by then, and was the best player of his time at endgame tactics. Further, the authors found that his reputation as a pawn grabber was highly exaggerated, and that he carried out a huge number of king attacks on the h-file. They also discovered that Korchnoi more than matched Karpov for openings in the 1978 title bout despite the unprecedented preparation of the Soviet chess machine, and that the key reason he lost that match was time trouble.

The book is supplemented with a generous supply of photos, many taken from the Korchnoi family archive and never before published.

Review Quotes

"The book offers a plethora of information which will be new even to Korchnoi's most ardent of fans.

This is a big book. The authors do not skimp on any aspect of the 11 years of Korchnoi action, whether it is battling with his bitter rivals in Candidates matches (he played three such matches with Tigran Petrosian in the period in question, for example), or the wider story of his life, including his sensational defection from the Soviet Union in 1976 (and the subsequent trials and tribulations of the wife and son he left behind), after sharing first place at the IBM tournament in Amsterdam...

This is a remarkable book about an extraordinary player. The chess world no longer has such characters. Forget the cod-sensationalism of The Queen's Gambit; the story of Viktor Korchnoi is far more interesting and thoroughly deserving of a television series of its own, for anyone who is brave enough to make it.

Meanwhile, this book is a must-buy for anyone interested in chess history, extraordinary personalities and games which are full-bodied struggles from the first move to the last." - Sean Marsh, CHESS Magazine, April 2024