Vidmar Memorial 1969

◈A new memorial for a Slovenian giant

The tournament was founded to honour Milan Vidmar (1885–1962), the Slovenian grandmaster and electrical engineer who had been one of the strongest players in the world in the years around the First World War. For its first running, the Slovenian federation assembled a sixteen-player round-robin mixing Yugoslavia's own strength — led by Svetozar Gligorić, alongside Aleksandar Matanović and a group of Slovenian masters — with invited foreign grandmasters: West Germany's Wolfgang Unzicker, Romania's Florin Gheorghiu, the American Robert Byrne, Hungary's Gedeon Barcza and Győző Forintos, Austria's Karl Robatsch, and Bulgaria's Georgi Tringov.

◈The genius from the bicycle factory

Nobody expected the story of the tournament to be Albin Planinc. Still untitled and unknown outside Slovenia, he worked his shift assembling bicycles at a Ljubljana factory while the visiting grandmasters spent their mornings preparing in their hotel rooms. He then sat down each round and outplayed them anyway, going unbeaten but for a single loss and finishing on 10½ from 15 — a full point clear of Gligorić, Yugoslavia's leading player, with Unzicker a further half point back in third.

The result made Planinc's name overnight and launched an international career that would soon carry him to the top boards of Yugoslav Olympiad teams. It remains one of the great breakthrough performances of the Vidmar Memorial's long history: an unheralded local player beating a field of ten grandmasters in the tournament's very first edition.