Miroslav Filip was a grandmaster from Prague who won the Czechoslovak championship three times and twice qualified for the Candidates Tournament, at Amsterdam in 1956 and Curaçao in 1962. He played for Czechoslovakia at twelve consecutive Olympiads, from Helsinki 1952 to Nice 1974, three times on top board. He beat the former World Champion Max Euwe in 1955, Vasily Smyslov in 1957, the year Smyslov held the title, and Mikhail Tal at Curaçao. After his playing career he arbitrated six World Championship matches and worked for many years as a chess journalist.
Prague
Filip was born in Prague on 27 October 1928. He won the Czechoslovak championship three times: in 1950 at Gottwaldov, in 1952 at Tatranská Lomnica and in 1954 in Prague. In 1954 he also played top board for the Czechoslovak team that won the World Student Team Championship in Oslo. FIDE made him an International Master in 1953 and a grandmaster in 1955. He held a doctorate in law.
Amsterdam, 1956
At the Gothenburg Interzonal of 1955 Filip shared seventh–ninth with Herman Pilnik and Boris Spassky on 11/20 and qualified for the Candidates Tournament, played in Amsterdam and Leeuwarden in 1956. He scored 8 points and shared eighth place, but in the penultimate round he beat Paul Keres, who had reached a winning position and needed the point to catch Vasily Smyslov. Smyslov won the tournament and went on to take the world title from Mikhail Botvinnik in 1957.
Filip beat the former World Champion Max Euwe at the European Team Championship preliminaries in Rotterdam in 1955, and at the final in Vienna in 1957 he beat Smyslov, who was then World Champion. He took first place at Prague 1956.
“At six foot nine inches Miroslav Filip was an imposing presence at the chess board.”
Curaçao, 1962
At the Stockholm Interzonal of 1962, won by Bobby Fischer, Filip shared fourth place with Viktor Korchnoi on 14 points and qualified for the Candidates Tournament in Curaçao. He finished there in a tie for last place with Tal, but in round 12 he beat Tal with Black in a Sicilian, the best-known win of his career.
Twelve Olympiads
Filip played in every Olympiad from Helsinki 1952 to Nice 1974, twelve in a row, three times on top board. He played 194 Olympiad games and scored 62 wins, 104 draws and 28 losses. At the European Team Championship of 1970 in Kapfenberg he had the best score on board two and won the individual gold medal.
Arbiter and writer
Filip stopped playing international tournaments in the early 1980s. He was the non-playing captain of the Czechoslovak team that took second place at the 1982 Olympiad, and FIDE appointed him arbiter for six World Championship matches, among them Anatoly Karpov against Viktor Korchnoi at Baguio in 1978. He wrote a book on the 1956 Candidates Tournament and another on the Baguio match, Sto dní v Baguiu, ran the chess column of the Prague daily Sport, and presented chess on Czechoslovak radio and television. In a poll marking a hundred years of organized chess in the Czech lands he was voted the sixth-best Czech player of the century. He died in Prague on 27 April 2009, at eighty.
In My Great Predecessors, Part V (2006), Kasparov records Filip’s role during the closing stages at Baguio. When Lothar Schmid left after game 27, Filip, the new chief arbiter, replaced him on the match jury. After game 32, Raymond Keene telephoned Filip to communicate Korchnoi’s resignation; Korchnoi then wrote to Filip that he would not resume the game, while refusing to sign the score sheet because of his objections to the match conditions.
Legacy
Filip twice reached the Candidates, the best record of any Czech player in the FIDE World Championship cycle. He played twelve Olympiads for his country, beat Euwe, Smyslov and Tal, and after he stopped playing he served the game for decades as an arbiter, journalist and broadcaster.
Books
Books Miroslav Filip wrote, co-wrote, edited, or contributed to. Translations and reprints are grouped under the same work.