Sarajevo 1976

[John Upham]

I'm looking for Bill Hartston's games from Sarajevo, 14-28 April 1976.

Arguably this was Bill's finest hour and he achieved clear first with 9/13 (sadly, this was 0.5 less than the required 9.5 for a GM norm).

I cannot locate the games from this event

Can you help ?

Thanks !

[Gerard Killoran]

I couldn't find any games in Informator but here's the tournament rankings.

Sarajevo 1976.png

[John Moore]

A search on Megabase brings up three games by Matulovic - vs Bogdanovic, Gliksman and Langeweg - but nothing else. Very odd; it was after all quite a strong tournament. I wonder if some games made their way to The Chess Player. I don't have the relevant volume to check.

[John Moore]

Informator has the same 3 Matulovic games (all of which he won, incidentally) plus Gliksman - Bogdanovic.

[John Moore]

The May 1976 Chess has a crosstable (which shows that Bill was undefeated with 5 wins and 8 draws) and a 3 line (!) report. It also has a deeply annotated game Hartston - Kosanski which went to 61 moves. Perhaps someone with the relevant issue and more skill than me can produce the game here for John.

[JustinHorton]

I am guessing Yugoslav magazines of the time should have more games, but how you get hold of people who may have them, I have little idea.

[Gerard Killoran]

From Felice

Chess Results, 1975-1977.png

[John Upham]

Thanks for your help everyone.

The crosstable also appears in The English Chess Explosion (Batsford, 1980) by Murray Chandler and Ray Keene :

eco_2.jpg

Also, WH has provided two of his games : Hartston - Kosanski and Durao - Hartston in his BCM report.

Basagic - Hartston appeared in a later Games Department article.

[John Moore]

I am guessing Yugoslav magazines of the time should have more games, but how you get hold of people who may have them, I have little idea.

I have a lot of German magazines, which tend to have full tournament reports with a lot of games for even quite obscure events. Unfortunately, I only have odd copies prior to 1978 and nothing which helps.

[Tim Harding]

Chess Player 12 had the crosstable. By then Tony Gillam was organising the games by opening and there is no index of events though there are indexes of players in the volumes.

So I don't propose to go hunting through these volumes for non-Hartston games.
The only Hartston games in CP12 are from other events. Bill was playing a lot abroad in 1976: also Decin, Beersheva.

In CP13 one of the two (!) games numbered 172 is Basagic-Hartston and 310 was Durao-Hartston, both as stated above being more accessible in BCM.

The Kosanski game was in CP14 game 686. The index says game 213 was by "Hartson" but it wasn't, nor any other game on adjacent pages. Life isn'#t long enough to go through the whole book in vain hope.

The two Bill games in CP15 are from 1977 events so I stopped looking.

Too bad, no joy.

[JustinHorton]

There is a Sarajevo chess club (who I suppose may have old bulletins, magazines etc) and there is what may be another Sarajevo club which has a website with a contact form, although the site doesn't look like it's been updated for a while.

[John Upham]

Bill reveals in his article that there was no official bulletin and that the three games (of his) that he gives were transcribed from memory following post event celebrations.

It is a pity (and IMHO unfair) that English Chess Explosion only includes 1 game of Bill's whereas there are 18 games from Tony Miles.

[Matt Mackenzie]

Fairly unusual for an event of that strength - in a huge chess country to boot - to have no bulletins I would have thought.