Curaçao 1962 Candidates Tournament

Eight of the world's best met in the Caribbean to decide who would challenge Mikhail Botvinnik. Tigran Petrosian won with 17½/27 and went on to win the title match, but Curaçao is remembered mostly for what came after, when a young Bobby Fischer accused the Soviet players of colluding to keep any Westerner from the title. His accusation led FIDE to replace the Candidates tournament with matches.

◇Eight players, four times over

The 1962 Candidates was a grueling quadruple round-robin: eight players — Petrosian, Paul Keres, Efim Geller, Fischer, Viktor Korchnoi, Pal Benko, Mikhail Tal, and Miroslav Filip — met each of their seven rivals four times, a schedule of nearly two months in the tropical heat. It was, by design, an endurance test as much as a chess tournament.

The strain told. Mikhail Tal, the former World Champion, fell ill and was hospitalised; he withdrew after the third of the four cycles with the lowest score in the field. Petrosian, famously imperturbable, ground his way to first place on 17½/27, a half-point ahead of his compatriots Keres and Geller, who tied for second on 17. Fischer, still only nineteen, finished a distant but proud fourth on 14.

◇The non-aggression pact

What lingered was not the winner but the pattern of results. The three top Soviet finishers — Petrosian, Keres and Geller — drew all twelve of their games against one another, in an average of only nineteen moves. Contemporary observers, and later some of the participants themselves, described an informal 'non-aggression pact': the trio conserved their energy against each other and threw their full strength at the outsiders, above all at Fischer.

Soon after the tournament Fischer went public. His article for Sports Illustrated, published in August 1962 under the headline The Russians Have Fixed World Chess, argued that the FIDE system all but guaranteed a Soviet champion and that the Candidates format could be — and had been — manipulated. However self-interested the complaint, its central charge about Curaçao has been widely judged to be substantially correct.

“The Russians Have Fixed World Chess.”

◇The format's last stand

Curaçao 1962 was the last time the challenger was chosen by a single all-play-all Candidates tournament. Stung by the collusion controversy, FIDE replaced it for the next cycle with a series of knockout matches — a format in which a lone player could no longer be ganged up on, and in which Fischer himself would eventually sweep to the 1972 title.

There was a small coda in the Soviet camp. Because the runner-up earned an automatic seed into the following cycle, Keres and Geller — level on 17 — played an eight-game tie-break match in Moscow that August; Keres won it 4½–3½. It is a separate event from the Curaçao tournament proper, held two months later and half a world away.