Korchnoi's Events 1998-99 / 2014-15
After my previous Korchnoi post, Events 1976-2000, I looked at TWIC's records starting with the year 1998, and added a summary for the years 1998-99 to my index page Viktor Korchnoi's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (TMER, 1946-1977). When does Korchnoi's TMER end? Wikipedia's page, Viktor Korchnoi, says,
Korchnoi became the oldest player ever to win a national championship, when he won the 2009 Swiss championship at age 78. He won the national title again a few months after his 80th birthday in July 2011 after a playoff game with Joseph Gallagher.
Chess.com's Peter Doggers, in Viktor Korchnoi, 1931-2016 (June 2016), wrote,
Korchnoi's last recorded games were the four rapid games that he played against Wolfgang Uhlmann at the 2015 Zurich Chess Challenge. He also played two rapid games against the same opponent in 2014 in Leipzig.
His last classical games were from 2012, played in the Swiss Team Championship. At the end of that year, when he was 81, he suffered from a stroke, and later he had problems with his heart as well. He was scheduled to play in the 2013 Zurich Christmas Open, but withdrew due to health reasons.
TWIC's Mark Crowther covered the two Uhlmann matches in TWIC 1014 & 1059. By the time I wrote this post, I had located four events Korchnoi played in his last two years:-
- Korchnoi Again Plays Chess. Against Uhlmann, not Spassky Though (chess-news.ru/en; March 2014)
- Pegasus chess extravaganza in Dresden (chessbase.com; September 2014) 'The white side consisted of GMs Uhlmann, Darga and Hecht, while the black side was represented by Korchnoi, Taimanov and Padevsky. It was a discussion game: the three players would come to a consensus and then a move would be made.'
- Korchnoi vs. Uhlmann, two legends in Zürich (chess24.com; February 2015)
- The man who has spent his whole life in the game (chessdiagonals.ch; June 2016) 'Viktor Korchnoi's last games in public were the four rapid games he played against his longtime friend from Saint Petersburg, Mark Taimanov at the [Lucerne] Chess Museum in November 2015.'
There were undoubtedly other games. Korchnoi must have been the most active chess grandmaster in history.
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