13 March 2017

Korchnoi's Career 1946-1977, Long Events

Continuing with Viktor Korchnoi's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (TMER; 1946-2015), in my previous post, Korchnoi's Career 1946-1977, Major Events, I wrote

The 'On Paper' post (also used in 'Three Views') would appear to be the most promising area for further analysis.

That post was Korchnoi's Career 1945-1977 on Paper (January 2017). In that post I started to analyze the content of 'Korchnoi's Chess Games' by Levy & O'Connell by scanning the index of opponents.

According to a preliminary analysis, the book has 1663 games played against 486 opponents. I'll delve further into this record for my next post.

Delving further, I counted 215 events, of which 111 (about half) had more than five games. Of these events, 33 had more than 15 games. These events are shown in the following table.

The second column ('Venue') is the code used by Levy & O'Connell (L&O). The third column ('Ct') is the number of games I identified from their book's index. The last column is the name of the event used in the TMER, which also lists Korchnoi's final score in W-L-D format. That final score allows a quick calculation of the number of games played by Korchnoi. In events where that doesn't match the 'Ct' column, I've flagged the discrepancy in square brackets ('[]'). For example, in the 1954 Bucharest tournament I counted 16 games in the L&O book, but the TMER gives Korchnoi a final score of +10-1=6.

Since a discrepancy can arise from a number of situations -- an error in the book, an error in my manipulation of the data, or an error in the TMER index -- each discrepancy needs to be examined further. I looked at the last one, the 1977 match vs Spassky and discovered that one game in the book used a different code to identify the venue. This little exercise gave me some additional confidence to continue with the data.

No comments: