Buenos Aires 1970

Buenos Aires had once handed Bobby Fischer the worst tournament result of his life. He came back in July 1970 — the year of his return to serious chess — and took the second Torneo Internacional Ciudad de Buenos Aires apart: 15 points from 17 games, thirteen wins, four draws, not a single loss, and three and a half points clear of a field that included a former World Champion.

◇The city that had beaten him

Fischer had played a Buenos Aires international once before, in 1960, and it went badly: 8½ from 19 (+3 −5 =11), far behind the joint winners Viktor Korchnoi and Samuel Reshevsky on 13. Wikipedia calls it the rare failure of his competitive career.

The 1970 event — the second Torneo Internacional Ciudad de Buenos Aires, staged by the city in the Sala Casacuberta of the Teatro General San Martín — ran from 19 July to 15 August. Eighteen players contested seventeen rounds. Vasily Smyslov, world champion in 1957–58, was there; so were Reshevsky, Miguel Najdorf, Oscar Panno, Florin Gheorghiu, László Szabó, Alberic O'Kelly de Galway, the young Brazilian Henrique Mecking, and a 24-year-old Soviet named Vladimir Tukmakov.

◇Eleven and a half from twelve

Fischer opened by beating Tukmakov and simply did not stop. Six straight wins, a draw with Najdorf in round seven, then five more wins — 11½ from his first 12 games. He gave up half a point to Mecking in round thirteen, another to Reshevsky in fifteen, and a last one to Smyslov in the final round. Those four draws, against Najdorf, Mecking, Reshevsky and Smyslov, were the whole of the resistance: he finished on 15/17 without losing a game.

Behind him the tournament was a genuine fight. Tukmakov took second on 11½, among the best international results of his career and a step toward the grandmaster title he received in 1972; Panno was third on 11; Najdorf, Reshevsky and Gheorghiu shared fourth on 10½. Smyslov's 9 points were the strangest line on the table — a single win and sixteen draws.

“Fischer put all his effort into every game. He rarely got up from his board to wander among the other tables.”

◇A city that turned out

The Sala Casacuberta filled day after day. Fischer stayed on in Argentina after the closing ceremony to give simultaneous displays, one of them in the open air on Calle Florida, and the affection of the Buenos Aires public followed him afterwards; the Argentine press has kept returning to that month ever since.

The rest of 1970 confirmed what Buenos Aires suggested. Fischer had already won at Rovinj/Zagreb and beaten Tigran Petrosian 3–1 in the USSR versus Rest of the World match; he went on to an individual silver medal at the Siegen Olympiad and then won the Palma de Mallorca Interzonal on 18½/23, launching the run of twenty consecutive wins over elite opposition that carried him to the 1972 world title match.