Dortmund 1983

Romania's Mihai Suba won the eleventh Dortmunder Schachtage by half a point over Murray Chandler and defending champion Vlastimil Hort — but the story of the fortnight was Maia Chiburdanidze, the 22-year-old reigning Women's World Champion, who finished fourth ahead of most of the grandmaster field.

◇Suba's half-point margin

Mihai Suba arrived in Dortmund in the best form of his career: Romanian champion in 1980 and 1981, and third at the Las Palmas Interzonal of 1982. At the eleventh Dortmunder Schachtage he converted six wins into 8/11, holding off Murray Chandler and the defending champion Vlastimil Hort by half a point. Chandler's 7½ echoed his runner-up finish at Dortmund 1980; Hort, unbeaten champion the year before, followed up with a share of second.

Suba's dynamic, unorthodox handling of the opening and middlegame later found its way into print: his book Dynamic Chess Strategy (1991) became a modern classic that challenged orthodox views of positional play.

◇Chiburdanidze among the grandmasters

Maia Chiburdanidze had held the Women's World Championship since 1978, when she took the title at seventeen — the youngest women's world champion until Hou Yifan. In Dortmund she showed how comfortably she belonged in open company: 7/11 and clear fourth, with wins over István Csom, Nigel Short, Murray Chandler, and Klaus Bischoff, and a single loss — to the tournament winner Suba. A year later FIDE made her only the second woman, after Nona Gaprindashvili, to be awarded the full grandmaster title.

Her round-five victim was the seventeen-year-old Nigel Short, who in 1980 had become the youngest international master in the world. Dortmund 1983 was a rare setback on his climb: the future world-championship challenger shared tenth on 3/11, a year before he earned the grandmaster title.