17th Chess Olympiad — Havana 1966

◇Havana under Castro

Fifty-two nations travelled to Havana for an Olympiad organised under the patronage of Fidel Castro, himself a keen chess player. The teams were drawn into seven preliminary groups of four-board round robins; the top two from each advanced to the fourteen-team Championship Final (Final A), with the remainder divided into Final B, Final C and a ten-team Final D.

As in the whole 1952–1974 era, each final was scored on its own, so the board points shown are totals within a section rather than across the field. The archive here holds 1,924 of the 1,944 games played, twenty having been forfeited.

◇Five clear, and a tie-break for bronze

The Soviet Union again pulled away, finishing on 39½ points — five clear of the United States on 34½. Behind them the bronze came down to a dead heat: Hungary and Yugoslavia both scored 33½, level on match points and on their head-to-head result. The ambiguity in the rules over which tie-break to apply proved decisive; an unweighted Neustadtl (Sonneborn–Berger) score was used, and it placed Hungary ahead of Yugoslavia for the bronze. Argentina (30) and Czechoslovakia (29½) completed the top six.

It was the Soviets' eighth consecutive Olympiad gold, once more led from the top board by world champion Petrosian.

◇Fischer and Petrosian on top board

The board-one duel was the tournament's showpiece. Fischer, playing every American match, scored 15 out of 17 — fourteen wins, two draws and a single loss, to Romania's Florin Gheorghiu — a result that would have won most boards outright. But Petrosian's 11½/13 (88.5%) edged him on percentage for the board-one gold, leaving Fischer with silver. On board three, Mikhail Tal was untouchable, taking gold with 12/13 for 92.3%.