20th Chess Olympiad — Skopje 1972

◈The format at Skopje

Sixty-three teams played a two-stage, four-board round robin. Eight preliminary groups fed the top two of each into a sixteen-nation Championship Final (Final A), with the rest divided among Finals B, C and D. Points are tallied within each section, so a team lower down the standings can post a larger total than one placed above it.

Bobby Fischer, the newly crowned World Champion, did not appear — as he would not throughout his reign — but the Soviet Union arrived with characteristic strength, including Mikhail Tal on board four and the young Anatoly Karpov as first reserve.

◈Decided at the death

For once the Soviet machine was made to sweat. Hungary matched them stride for stride and the gold was not settled until the last round, the Soviet Union finishing on 42 board points to Hungary's 40½. Yugoslavia took bronze on 38, ahead of Czechoslovakia (35½), West Germany (35) and Bulgaria (32).

The individual boards told part of the story: Robert Hübner of West Germany topped board one with 83.3%, while the Soviet reserves shone — Tal scored 87.5% on board four and Karpov 86.7% as first reserve, an early sign of the champion he would soon become.

◈Politics at the board

The Olympiad was not free of the era's tensions. In Final B the Albanian team refused to face Israel and withdrew after round eleven; its remaining games were reclassified as friendlies that did not count, and Albania is shown unranked in the standings. For the veterans it was also a farewell — Denmark's Jens Enevoldsen played his eleventh and final Olympiad, thirty-nine years after his debut at Folkestone in 1933.