Rubinstein Memorial 1975

◇Two careers crossing at the board

Averbakh and Plachetka each won six of their fifteen games and lost only one, finishing level on 10 points apiece. For Averbakh, by then long past his own run as a Soviet Championship winner and Candidates competitor, this Polanica-Zdrój result stood as his last notable tournament success as a player — the point in his career, as later chess writers put it, where his energies were shifting from competing at the board to the systematic study of the endgame that became his life's work.

For Plachetka, still building his reputation as one of Czechoslovakia's leading players, sharing first at Polanica-Zdrój in 1975 was one of the results — alongside later wins at Sofia and Trnava in 1979 — that carried him to the grandmaster title in 1978, when he became the first player from Slovakia to hold it.

◇A crowded chasing pack

Zbigniew Doda took clear third for Poland on 9½, with East Germany's Wolfgang Uhlmann joining Ronald Knaak on 9, and Latvia's Jānis Klovans, the American Ken Rogoff and Cuba's Silvino García Martínez grouped just behind on 8½. The sixteen-player field also drew entrants from Bulgaria, Sweden, Hungary and Norway, keeping the memorial's tradition of a genuinely international entry.