Manila 1990 Interzonal

For the first time FIDE ran the Interzonal as a single mass Swiss event rather than a round-robin: sixty-four players, thirteen rounds, eleven Candidates places at stake. Vassily Ivanchuk and Boris Gelfand shared first on 9/13, and two young Soviet grandmasters served notice of the era to come.

◇A new kind of Interzonal

The 1990 Manila event broke with tradition: instead of splitting the qualifiers among several round robins, FIDE put the whole field of sixty-four into one thirteen-round Swiss for the 1991–1993 World Championship cycle. The top eleven would go on to the Candidates, with the right to face Garry Kasparov at stake. In a Swiss, players meet only part of the field, so there is no full crosstable for the event.

Vassily Ivanchuk and Boris Gelfand, both young Soviet grandmasters in their early twenties, shared first place on 9/13. Viswanathan Anand and Nigel Short followed on 8½, and a large group tied on 8 — Gyula Sax, Viktor Korchnoi, Robert Hübner, Predrag Nikolić, Leonid Yudasin, Sergey Dolmatov, and Alexey Dreev — completing the eleven who qualified.

◇Fine margins

With eleven places decided over a single Swiss, the cut was cruel. Mikhail Gurevich stood in comfortable qualifying position entering the finish, only to lose his last two games — to Anand and then to Short — and slip to twelfth, missing the Candidates by the narrowest of margins.

For the joint winners it was a springboard. Ivanchuk and Gelfand both became regular world-title contenders through the 1990s and beyond, and Manila was one of the tournaments that first put them at the very top. Days after the last round, the Luzon earthquake of July 16, 1990 struck the Philippines north of Manila.