Chigorin Memorial 1983

The 1983 Chigorin Memorial in Sochi ended with two Soviet players sharing first place: Anatoly Vaisser, the Kazakhstan-born master who would later win four world senior titles for France, and Evgeny Sveshnikov, author of the Sicilian variation that bears his name, repeating the shared Sochi triumph he had first managed in 1976.

◇Late summer in Sochi

The 1983 edition of the Chigorin Memorial, played in the Black Sea resort that had hosted the series since 1963, drew fifteen players for a fourteen-round single round-robin of 105 games — a Category 11 event averaging around 2505 Elo. The Soviet contingent spanned the generations: the veteran Efim Geller and Yugoslavia's Borislav Ivkov anchored one end of the field, while at the other stood the twenty-year-old Andrei Sokolov, world junior champion at Copenhagen the year before and within twelve months a Soviet champion and grandmaster.

Between them came Oleg Romanishin, Vitaly Tseshkovsky, Sergey Makarichev, Alexander Panchenko, Semen Dvoirys and Valery Chekhov, with an international element supplied by Romania's Mihai Șubă, Bulgaria's Ventzislav Inkiov, East Germany's Hans-Ulrich Grünberg and Czechoslovakia's Eduard Meduna.

◇A shared crown

Vaisser and Sveshnikov finished together on 9/14, a point and a half clear of Grünberg and Inkiov on 7½. For Vaisser — an international master since 1982 who had climbed to around fiftieth in the world that summer — the shared victory was among the results that carried him toward the grandmaster title he received in 1985, long before his second career as a four-time world senior champion under the French flag.

For Sveshnikov it was a second Chigorin Memorial crown, seven years after sharing first with Lev Polugaevsky in the 1976 edition, and further proof that one of the sharpest opening theoreticians of his generation remained a dangerous tournament competitor.