Beverwijk 1965 (Hoogovens)

The 27th Hoogovens tournament returned to Beverwijk with another sixteen-player round-robin. Soviet grandmaster Efim Geller and Hungary's Lajos Portisch — the latter a fixture near the top of these events — shared first on 10½/15, with Bulgaria's Milko Bobotsov a single half-point behind them.

◇A tight grandmaster group

By 1965 the Hoogovens steelworks tournament had settled into its role as a leading January meeting on the international calendar, held in Beverwijk as a single round-robin of sixteen players. The field brought together Geller and Portisch, Bobotsov, Borislav Ivkov, Heinz Lehmann, Vladimir Bagirov, Svein Johannessen, Ludek Pachman and Aleksandar Matanović, with Jan Hein Donner and Kick Langeweg leading the Dutch contingent.

The race was close throughout the upper half of the table. Geller and Portisch finished level on 10½; Bobotsov pressed them all the way to 10, and only then did the field fall away, with Donner and Ivkov the next best on 8½.

◇Shared honours

Geller, one of the finest attacking players of the Soviet school and a perennial world-championship candidate, and Portisch, the leading Hungarian grandmaster of his generation, made worthy joint winners. For Donner it was a solid home result, sharing fourth in a field this strong.

The tournament would move from Beverwijk to nearby Wijk aan Zee in 1968, but in the mid-1960s the steel-town event was already drawing champions and candidates from across Europe and the Soviet Union.