Wijk aan Zee 1987 (Hoogovens)

◇The defending champion meets an old rival

Short returned to Wijk aan Zee as defending champion, and the field averaged 2556 — category XIII, a notch above his breakthrough win the year before. Korchnoi, absent from the 1986 field, was back, alongside former champion Ulf Andersson, Anthony Miles, Ljubomir Ljubojević, Gennadi Sosonko, Paul van der Sterren, John van der Wiel and Helgi Ólafsson. Jesús Nogueiras and Alonso Zapata brought Cuban and Colombian representation, with Krunoslav Hulak, Glenn Flear and Lev Gutman rounding out the fourteen.

The two men met in round one, and Short won with the white pieces. It was the only game Korchnoi lost in the entire tournament.

◇Two unbeaten runs, one finish line

From there the two ran in parallel. Short won five more — over Van der Wiel, Hulak, Ólafsson, Gutman and Ljubojević — against seven draws, for six wins, seven draws and no further losses. Korchnoi, needing to make up the round-one deficit, won seven of his remaining twelve games, including a round-ten win over Nogueiras and consecutive wins to close the tournament, against five draws and no more losses. Both finished on 9½/13 with performance ratings of 2726 and 2725 — Short's TPR one point higher, Korchnoi's rating six points higher going in.

Andersson took clear third on 8, a point and a half back. Nogueiras was fourth on 7½, with Zapata and Miles sharing fifth on 7. Ljubojević, Van der Sterren and Sosonko tied for seventh on 6½, Ólafsson took tenth on 6, and Van der Wiel, Flear, Hulak and Gutman filled out the bottom of the table.

◇A fourth title, thirty-one years apart

For the 55-year-old Korchnoi, twice a world championship challenger, it was a fourth Hoogovens title, after outright wins in 1968 and 1971 and a shared title with Alexander Beliavsky in 1984, nineteen years after his first. For Short it was a second title in a row, part of the rise that took him to a World Championship match with Garry Kasparov six years later.