1983 Candidates Matches

The 1983–84 Candidates was a knockout ladder of head-to-head matches to find a challenger for World Champion Anatoly Karpov. The 20-year-old Garry Kasparov swept through it — surviving a political storm that nearly cost him the semifinal by default — to earn his first World Championship match.

◇A bracket, not a tournament

Unlike a round-robin, this stage of the cycle was decided by a series of matches. Eight qualifiers were paired off: in the quarterfinals Kasparov beat Alexander Beliavsky 6–3 in Moscow, Viktor Korchnoi beat Lajos Portisch 6–3 at Bad Kissingen, and Zoltán Ribli beat Eugenio Torre 6–4 at Alicante. The fourth quarterfinal, Vasily Smyslov against Robert Hübner, was tied 7–7 after fourteen games and had to be settled by the drawing of lots, which sent the 62-year-old Smyslov through.

The standings table on this page treats the knockout as one big table, so it is only a rough summary. Kasparov and Smyslov come out on top because they played the most games on their way to the final, not because the event was decided on points.

◇The Pasadena crisis

Kasparov's semifinal against Korchnoi became a Cold War flashpoint. FIDE awarded the match to Pasadena, California, but Soviet authorities would not let Kasparov travel to the United States, and he was initially declared to have forfeited. The impasse was broken only when Korchnoi agreed to have both semifinals replayed in London late in 1983. There Kasparov beat Korchnoi 7–4, while Smyslov edged Ribli 6½–4½.

In the final, held in Vilnius in the spring of 1984, Kasparov beat Smyslov 8½–4½ to become the challenger for the World Championship. The marathon Karpov–Kasparov match that followed ran to 48 games before being controversially halted, the start of their long rivalry of the mid-1980s.