Buenos Aires 1960

◈A tournament for the Sesquicentenary

In 1960 Argentina marked one hundred and fifty years since the May Revolution of 1810, and among the commemorations was a great international chess tournament — the Gran Torneo Internacional del Sesquicentenario — played in the Aula Magna of the Faculty of Medicine in Buenos Aires across June and July. Twenty players contested a full single round-robin of nineteen rounds.

The field was formidable: Korchnoi, Taimanov, Reshevsky, Szabo, Evans, Unzicker, Uhlmann, Gligoric, Benko, Ivkov, Pachman and Olafsson among the visiting masters, set against Argentina's own Guimard, Rossetto, Eliskases, Wexler, Bazan and Foguelman — and, arriving as one of the favourites, the teenage Fischer.

◈Korchnoi and Reshevsky at the top

Viktor Korchnoi, who had won his first Soviet Championship earlier that year, and the veteran American Samuel Reshevsky finished level on 13/19 to share first place, with no play-off staged to separate them. Hungary's Laszlo Szabo took clear third a point behind on 12; behind him a cluster of Evans, Guimard, Rossetto and Taimanov shared fourth on 11.

For Reshevsky the result carried a private satisfaction: it was the only time he ever finished ahead of Fischer in an international tournament.

◈Fischer's off-tournament

Fischer had tied for first at Mar del Plata only weeks earlier, so his Buenos Aires collapse — 8½/19, three wins against five losses — was a genuine shock, leaving him tied for 13th–16th in a field he had been expected to lead. It stands out as the one clear failure of his competitive career. In his memoir, Pal Benko attributed the slump to an off-the-board distraction, a romance arranged before the event that pulled Fischer's attention away from the board.