Bucharest 1966

Viktor Korchnoi turned the 1966 Bucharest international into a procession. Already a four-time Soviet champion, he went through the fifteen-player field unbeaten, scoring 12½/14 to finish two and a half points clear of Romania's own grandmaster, Florin Gheorghiu.

◇No contest at the top

Fifteen players met in Bucharest in 1966, each playing fourteen games across a single round-robin of 105 games. Korchnoi, one of the strongest players in the world and the dominant figure in Soviet chess at the time, made it look routine: 12½ from 14, unbeaten, two and a half points ahead of everyone else.

Gheorghiu, by then Romania's first grandmaster, took clear second on 10. Lubomír Kavalek was third on 9½, with Milan Matulović and Béla Sóos sharing fourth on 9.

◇Korchnoi at his peak

By 1966 Viktor Korchnoi had already won the Soviet Championship four times — in 1960, 1962, 1964, and 1965 — and was firmly established among the world's elite. A dominant margin in a mixed international field like Bucharest was exactly what a player of his standing was expected to produce, and he delivered without dropping a game.

The runner-up carried a Romanian story of his own. Florin Gheorghiu — World Junior Champion in 1963 and, from 1965, his country's first grandmaster — was the leading local player of his generation and would go on to hold Romania's Olympiad first board for three decades.