Oscar Panno

◈A boy of the River Plate

Oscar Roberto Panno was born in Buenos Aires on 17 March 1935. He learned the moves at six, from his father, but chess only truly caught him at twelve, when he walked into the chess room of Club Atlético River Plate and found the two things a boy of that age most needs: textbooks, and the newspaper columns of Roberto Grau. He never really left. Seventy years later he would still be teaching in the same city, in the same clubs.

The Buenos Aires of his boyhood was one of the great chess capitals of the world, and Panno has always been clear about how much he owed it. “Buenos Aires has always been very connected to Europe via France and England,” he says, “and chess was one of the favourite activities.” The Second World War pushed a generation of European masters across the Atlantic — Miguel Najdorf among them — and Argentina became, for a while, a power. “The 1950s were the golden period of Argentine chess with 3 silver medals at the Olympiads in 1950, 1952 and 1954,” Panno recalled. “This atmosphere helped me become a World Junior Champion at the age of 18.”

◈Copenhagen, 1953

The second World Junior Championship was held in Copenhagen in the summer of 1953, and the entry list reads now like a roll-call of the next twenty years: Borislav Ivkov, Bent Larsen, Friðrik Ólafsson — all of them future grandmasters, all of them ahead of an eighteen-year-old from Buenos Aires whom nobody in Europe had reason to fear. Panno beat them and took the title. It was Argentina's first world title in chess, of any kind.

He was modest about it afterwards, and characteristically precise about why it mattered. “I got the first world title, although later on some other guys also won,” he said. “It did have a big impact because the press has a lot of influence.” That same year, still eighteen, he won the championship of Argentina — the first of four national titles he would collect across four decades, the last of them in 1992.

◈Gothenburg, and the door to the Candidates

Panno played five Interzonal tournaments in his life, and the greatest of them came first. At Gothenburg in 1955, in a field of twenty-one, he finished clear third — only half a point out of second, and ahead of Efim Geller, Tigran Petrosian and Boris Spassky. He beat Spassky, who would be world champion within fourteen years, in their individual game. FIDE made him a grandmaster that year; he was twenty years old, and it remains the high-water mark of his competitive career.

Third place carried him into the 1956 Candidates Tournament in Amsterdam, whose winner would play a twenty-four-game match with Mikhail Botvinnik for the world championship. The form did not travel. Panno finished in a tie for eighth and ninth in a ten-man field, in a tournament won by Vasily Smyslov. His own explanation was disarmingly flat: “It was not possible to prepare because I was in the military until 1 day before the trip.”

There was a deeper problem too, one that shaped every South American player of the era. “The chess information was very scarce and it reached us very late,” Panno remembered. “For example, at the moment of boarding the plane to go to a tournament GM Julio Bolbochan gave us the Russian magazines Shakhmaty with exactly 1 year delay.” Against opponents who had the whole Soviet analytical machine behind them, he added, “we were forced to compensate these problems with great personal efforts.”

◈The engineer

From 1958 to 1962 Oscar Panno largely disappeared from tournament chess. He was studying civil engineering, and he has never pretended the choice was forced on him. “I was never a professional player because in Argentina it cannot be a way of life,” he explained. “For this it was necessary to travel to Europe as various players did.” He chose otherwise: “I chose to stay because of my family and then I discovered other passion in engineering, to which I dedicated many years.” It is the quiet counterfactual hanging over his whole record — a Candidate at twenty who then gave his best years to structures rather than to norms.

And yet the chess kept coming. He won the international tournament at Mar del Plata in 1954 and again in 1969, sharing that one with Najdorf, and took the Mar del Plata opens of 1986, 1988 and 1994. He won the South American Championship in 1957 and 1969 and the Pan-American in 1958. In his late thirties he won the strong Palma de Mallorca invitational two years running — 1971 alongside Ljubomir Ljubojević, 1972 on the best tie-break ahead of Viktor Korchnoi and Jan Smejkal — and in 1977 he tied for first at Lone Pine, then among the most prestigious opens in the world. At the 1976 Manila Interzonal he beat Spassky again, twenty-one years after the first time.

He wore the Argentine shirt at eleven Chess Olympiads between 1954 and 1992. The 1954 team took the silver medal; the teams of 1958 and 1962 took bronze. Individually he won a bronze in 1958 and a gold on board two at Havana in 1966. In 1978 he sat on the other side of the table entirely, serving as one of Korchnoi's seconds for the world championship match against Anatoly Karpov at Baguio City.

◈The knight that carries his name

Panno's most durable contribution is not a result but an idea. The Panno Variation of the King's Indian Defence — Black's queen's knight coming to c6, a scheme that recurs in both the Sämisch and the Fianchetto systems — bears his name in every opening book printed since, and he can still describe exactly how it was born. “Up until 6…Nc6 the idea originated from the Yugoslavs, inviting White to play d5,” he said. “I asked myself, what happens if White doesn't push d5?” The answer was his own: “So I proposed to attack the centre with the flank pawns, which was completely compatible with the Yugoslav system.” It is an engineer's question followed by an engineer's answer — take the existing structure, find the untested load case, and design for it.

The same exactness colours the way he talks about the game itself, without a trace of sentimentality. “Of course it is a rather cruel game,” he told an interviewer. “For example, I like tennis better, because tennis gives you the chance to take revenge… On the other hand, chess is a very precise construction that one can spoil with just one move. Chess is cruel.” He has spent much of his later life trying to give that precision away rather than guard it, arguing that the game belongs in classrooms: “It is of utmost importance to obtain the chess literacy of the youngest, for this having chess in schools is fundamental.”