Biel (1983) — a no-first-look look

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PGN link to tournament:    Biel (1983)

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<Suenteus> is planning on doing this tournament, afaik. He posted about it in his forum as needing finishing, so I donated a little time to finishing it off.

My version utilized some advanced techniques, and a little guesswork, as explained below.

First, the complete set of games are available on <365>. But those games are without round numbers or dates. A subset of the tournament’s 66-games are available on <CG>, specifically 36-games. All of those games have round numbers, but no dates.

The question was then how to assign round numbers and dates to all the games. It would be nice to find a published schedule, but that doesn’t seem to be available, at least, not on the online sources I utilize. There’s some tournament coverage in Jaques v140 (Sept 1983) p392/38, but no schedule, or even dates, on any of the select games it does publish.

Jaque does provide a very handy xtab, which checks well against the 365 version of the tournament (see RR xtab at end of this article):

Jaque v140 (Sept 1983) p393/39

There is some coverage, including round pairings and results, in a few contemporaneous issues of Fan L’Expess, a Neuchatel newspaper.

http://doc.rero.ch/search?ln=en&c=&c=NAVPRESS.LEXPRESS&c=NAVPRESS&c=NAVPRESS&so=d&f=fulltext&cc=PRESS&keep_facet_filter=1&sf=publication_date

Unfortunately not all the schedule is covered, and information is only available for R3, R5/6 (intermixed), R8 and R11. This is very valuable supplemental information to the <CG> games, but far from complete. There is enough information to match up with a Berger table program, and finally match up all the games missing round numbers. The Berger ordering found was thus:

1. Nemet
2. Miles
3. Gheorghi
4. Meduna
5. Kindermann
6. Wirthhenson
7. Nunn
8. Adorjan
9. Toth
10. Campora
11. Hebden
12. Gobet

So now Phony has a partner in Berger guesswork crimes!

Anyways, all the games can now be assigned a round number, and we can be fairly confident it’s correct.

Next, we want to assign a date to each round. The L’Express articles are helpful, but far from complete, and so merely indicative. However, <Suenteus> did find all the games for the 1984 version of the tournament, ie. the next year version of the tournament. Using this as a template, yields a schedule which does conform to information in the 1983 articles – and so was adopted. It should be noted that the schedule utilized cannot be claimed to be 100% correct because of this assumption – but it is correct to within a day or two, most certainly.

This schedule has been published on the Bistro:

Jul-08-16

zanzibar: Speaking of <suenteus>, here’s a post he made which could also serve as a roadmap for future contributions:suenteus po 147 chessforum (kibitz #3232) * * * * * I worked a little on <Biel (1983)> over coffee… It looks like 365 has all the games: http://www.365chess.com/tournaments… <CB online> might as well, but a search on <Biel 1983> only pulls up 40 of the games: https://database.chessbase.com/?lan… There’s some newspaper coverage I found in Fan-L’Express, a Neuchatel paper found on rero.ch – but the coverage isn’t enough to get a full schedule. The bracket dates can be found here: http://www.bijube.ch/page-8307.html And using <suenteus>‘s 1984 schedule gives a plausible schedule which agrees with both of the above: < July 1983 R1 – Sun 17th R2 – Mon 18th R3 – Tue 19th R4 – Wed 20th Thu 21th – rest day R5 – Fri 22th R6 – Sat 23th R7 – Sun 24th R8 – Mon 25th R9 – Tue 26th Wed 27th – rest day R10 – Thu 28th R11 – Fri 29th Sat 30th – completion day + awards >

This seems to be an important component to claiming a finished tournament on <CG>. While I agree it’s nice to have, I’m personally happy with just having the rounds for every game, together with the bracket dates (i.e. the start/finish dates of the tournament). After all, many of the games aren’t finished on the same day they begin, and so a complete accounting of a tournament is truly an exacting, and quite taxing, experience.

OK, in this case it was only moderately difficult. As was reading all the details up to this point!

The tournament Swiss xtab can be presented:

Biel (1983)
Biel SUI, 1983.07.17 - 1983.07.29
                              Ti Age Nat    Score       1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9   10   11 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1: Miles, Anthony                28 ENG   8.0 / 11    6w= 12b+  9w=  4w=  5b+  7w+ 11b+  2w=  3b+  8w= 10b=  (+5 -0 =6)
 2: Nunn, John D. M.          gm  28 ENG   8.0 / 11   11b+  9b+  3w=  8b= 10w+  6b= 12w+  1b=  4w+  5b=  7w=  (+5 -0 =6)
 3: Adorjan, Andras           gm  33 HUN   7.0 / 11    7b+ 11w+  2b=  9b+  8w+ 10b-  6w+ 12b+  1w-  4b=  5w-  (+6 -3 =2)
 4: Gheorghiu, Florin         gm  39 ROU   6.5 / 11   10w=  6b= 12w+  1b=  9w+  5w=  7b= 11w=  2b-  3w=  8b+  (+3 -1 =7)
 5: Meduna, Eduard            gm  33 CZE   6.5 / 11    8w+ 10b=  6w- 12b+  1w-  4b=  9w-  7w+ 11b+  2w=  3b+  (+5 -3 =3)
 6: Hebden, Mark L            gm  25 ENG   5.5 / 11    1b=  4w=  5b+  7w- 11b=  2w=  3b-  8w- 10b+  9b+ 12w=  (+3 -3 =5)
 7: Kindermann, Stefan E. S.  gm  24 AUT   5.5 / 11    3w-  8b- 10w+  6b+ 12w+  1b-  4w=  5b-  9w+ 11w=  2b=  (+4 -4 =3)
 8: Toth, Bela                im  40 ITA   4.5 / 11    5b-  7w+ 11b=  2w=  3b-  9b+ 10w-  6b+ 12w-  1b=  4w-  (+3 -5 =3)
 9: Gobet, Fernand            im  21 SUI   4.0 / 11   12b+  2w-  1b=  3w-  4b-  8w-  5b+ 10w+  7b-  6w- 11b=  (+3 -6 =2)
10: Campora, Daniel Hugo      gm  26 ARG   4.0 / 11    4b=  5w=  7b- 11w=  2b-  3w+  8b+  9b-  6w- 12b-  1w=  (+2 -5 =4)
11: Wirthensohn, Heinz        im  32 SUI   3.5 / 11    2w-  3b-  8w= 10b=  6w= 12b=  1w-  4b=  5w-  7b=  9w=  (+0 -4 =7)
12: Nemet, Ivan               gm  40 SUI   3.0 / 11    9w-  1w-  4b-  5w-  7b- 11w=  2b-  3w-  8b+ 10w+  6b=  (+2 -7 =2)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
66 games: +18 =25 -23

(Beware the usual cautions of SCID’s xtabs, e.g. nationalities and titles may not apply contemporaneously. E.g. Nemet is listed as Swiss in the SCID table, and Yugoslavian in the contemporaneous Jaque table)

And here is the RR xtab sorted alphabetically:

Some additional details about the tournament can be found in the Jaque article. Perhaps I can do a Proquest search later. Unfortunately, I’m limited in the research I can do without Public Domain sources (one reason I’ve concentrated on the Victorian era thus far).

zz