English Chess Forum

I stumbled across this lovely piece of international work teams chess history in a different thread. A group of chess enthusiasts who ran work teams for airlines had the bright idea to run a series of chess tournaments known as the International Interline Chess Championships. It appears they started in the late 1970s and were annual events for many years. Not sure the standard of the chess reached stratospheric heights (sorry for the awful pun), but it is interesting to see how it developed, though I have struggled to track down the early history.

One of the tournament bulletins is archived here:

https://timarit.is/page/8186867#page/n0/mode/2up

"X. International Interline Chess Championship Reykjavik Iceland 11-17 October 1987".
(There must be a way to download the whole document as a PDF, rather than just individual pages? Lots of other chess content on that site, mostly in Icelandic.)

I had assumed that this series only ran for a short while in the 1980s, but I was astonished to discover it was still running as late as 2009:

https://interline.tsf.org.tr/content/view/15/19/

"XXV Annual International Interline Chess Tournament"
"25-31 October 2009, Istanbul, Turkey"

If that was 25 and 1987 was number 10, a few years must have been skipped.

A strange (but also lovely) place to find some of this history is this obituary:

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/sa ... d=54985725

Tom liked to play chess which took he and Katie to many places around the world. He was part of the Interline Chess club, and they went to Bali, Indonesia twice, Fortaleza, Brazil, Hawaii, and Menton, France.

It is actually quite difficult to confirm any of this, as these look to be quite small, privately organised, niche chess events.

Does anyone know anything more about these tournaments? The early ones appear to have been documented in the chess press. The later ones less so (it looks more commercialised at that point).

Found this on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/AnsettMuseum/p ... 378329183/

Sir Reginald Ansett Transport Museum
14 September at 08:00
·
THE STAFF NEWSPAPER FOR ALL ANSETT COMPANIES
ANSETT NEWS - No. 110 SEPTEMBER 1990.
CHESS CLUB PLANS ITS NEXT MOVE . .
ANSETT CHESS Club, with team members from Melbourne and Brisbane fly to Malacca this month to compete in the 13th Interline Chess Tournament.
Last year (1989) in Las Vegas Ansett was sixth from a field of 24 airlines from around the world.

Report from 1988 in The Straits Times chess column (Singapore):

https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspaper ... .2.128.6.1

Previous tournaments (prior to 1990) held in Mexico City, Los Angeles, Miami, Bangkok, Penang and Reykjavik (from the newspaper clipping posted on Facebook, linked above). So several still not accounted for or matched up to the right years.

A report on the 1982 event in Tampa Bay was provided for BCM by Alan Perkins (of British Airways).

1st - 1978 - Rio de Janeiro [Icelandair]
2nd - 1979 - Miami [Lufthansa]
3rd - 1980 - Bangkok [Aviaco]
4th - 1981 - Malaga [Iberia]
5th - 1982 - Tampa Bay [Icelandair]
6th - 1983 - Los Angeles [Varig]
7th - 1984 - Mexico City [Icelandair]
8th - 1985 - M/S Caribe I [Varig A]
9th - 1986 - Penang [Icelandair]
10th - 1987 - Reykjavik [Icelandair]
11th - 1988 - Honolulu
12th - 1989 - Las Vegas
13th - 1990 - Malacca
14th - 1991 - Bali
15th - 1992 - M/S Caribe I

[...]

23rd - 2003 - Cancun
24th - 2008 - Bali
25th - 2009 - Istanbul

There is a now-cybersquatted website that seems to indicate that the 26th such event took place in Jakarta in 2017, but that seems unclear with a gap of eight years.

More exotic is the description of the 1992 event (originally scheduled for Caracas in Venezuela, and maybe they sailed from there):

"[The 15th] Interline Chess Tournament was held November 14-21, 1992. Thirty-five teams from 19 airlines competed aboard the ship CARIBE 1 during a cruise of the Caribbean. With over 130 players being joined by many of their families, over 400 people were part of the chess cruise. The complete second sitting for dinner was turned over to chess players." (From: Chess Life - Volume 48 - Page 8.)

I am getting vibes of the late Stewart Reuben here! Sadly, no trace yet of any tournaments being run on an aircraft while in flight. Cruise ships a far more civilised form of transport (the 2014 US Senior Championships were held on board a cruise ship). Anyway, maybe others can full in the gaps for the missing years?

EDIT: Updated as more data located (with thanks to those below who have helped).

Information about the 1986 tournament:
https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspaper ... 1.2.88.9.3
If I read it correctly, it was held at the Orchard Sun Hotel in Penang, Malaysia.

Thank you so much, Jon! It is interesting that fragments of the history are reported in those Singapore newspaper columns. Clearly there is an underlying sources (likely the tournament reports or bulletins) where information is coming from, such as that Icelandair won in 1978, 1982 and 1984. They won again that year 1986, and won again in 1987. Clearly the comment in the 1987 event report was not in jest: half of Icelanders are chess players and the other half are poets, and only rarely the twain shall meet!

I did pick up another bit of history in the article on where to hold the 1988 event (from the 1987 tournament report, page 37 - it appears to have been published as an insert inside the Icelandic publication 'Hrad-Skak'): "...we feel it would be very fitting to start the new phase of the International Interline where it began, in Rio de Janeiro."

It actually ended up in Honolulu, Hawaii.

I will update the list above as research findings trickle in. I have copies of the sources so far, but not the 1983 BCM report by Alan Perkins on the 1982 event yet (this may only be a few paragraphs, not sure).

I have found the report of the 1983 event by AHP.

I can reproduce it here if you wish.

Just realised that I had found the report of the 1982 in the Feb 1983 BCM.

Will look again for the report of the 1983 event.

It was the 1982 event that was reported in 1983 by Alan Perkins. That is the one I am after (the Feb 1983 BCM, page 56). I don't think there were other reports, but I may have missed those. These events seem to have been held late in the year, so reports generally appeared the following year. I am not sure how many of these events had a British Airways team, or if Alan Perkins and John Quinn went to any other than the 1982 event.

Thanks Ian. I was about to key the report in...

Thank you! I wonder if the 1983 event was hosted by Saudia or not?

From a different thread:

aharley wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 12, 2025 8:46 pm

John Quinn writes:

A question has been asked on the forum about an article Alan wrote for the BCM about an airline chess competition.

I have records of playing in 3 of the interline events: Tampa in 82, Mexico City in 84 and Penang in 86. I think Alan was on Bd 1 with myself on Bd 2 in each of them

They were fun with just 1 hour each per game.

I will add Mexico City to the list above for 1984.

That leaves Los Angeles and Miami to match with years prior to 1990, and three more years to identify venues for. Along with 7 sets of details for the 16th to 22nd editions inclusive (though I suspect those ones may be more difficult unless someone in the airline industry kept records).

Interesting that they were effectively just rapidplay events. I think 1 hour per game would be classed as that.

An hour per player for a game is the minimum to be "classically" rated by the ECF, not sure what the FIDE rules are?

It looks like the 2004 tournament should have been in Miama:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040830192 ... ss.com:80/
but later versions of this website suggest that it was cancelled.

Similarly the 2010 tournament should have been in Las Vegas:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101107074 ... chess.com/

And the 2011 one in Trelawny, Jamaica:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130607224 ... chess.com/

This page has some pictures:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141119011 ... s2010.html

Thank you, Jon. It is nice that some memories and photos seem to have survived.

This is also a history that spans both the pre-internet era, and the early- to mid-internet era, as shown by some of the history now residing in the Wayback Machine!

Love the crosstable for the 1992 event on the cruise ship. Garuda came first, Yugoslav second, Icelandair 3rd.

I would say something about how easy it is for such history to be lost, but I have a similar sort of history I need to write myself...

Not sure where records of the early Interline tournaments might still survive.

The Carlos Augstroze named as the organiser for these events for many, many years, if I have identified the right person, sadly passed away in 2022:

https://www.suessfuneralhome.net/obitua ... -augstroze

Carlos Augstroze (December 24, 1932 - January 6, 2022).

After his 1958 honorable discharge as Specialist 3rd Class from the US Army, where he served in the Transportation Corps in the Panama Canal Zone, Mr. Augstroze started with Delta Airlines in 1959, loading baggage onto propeller passenger airplanes on the night shift at Idlewild Airport, now known as JFK, in New York City. He worked his way up the ladder, retiring in 1997 as Vice President of International Marketing. He was subsequently Senior Vice President of International Marketing at Transbrasil Airlines.

No chess mentioned there, but that must be the same person. He is mentioned in the 1987 publications.

And I completely missed that there were five issues (or inserts) for Hrad-Skak covering the 1987 event!!

https://timarit.is/page/8186835#page/n0/mode/2up

https://timarit.is/page/8186851#page/n0/mode/2up

https://timarit.is/page/8186867#page/n0/mode/2up

https://timarit.is/page/8186883#page/n0/mode/2up

https://timarit.is/page/8186899#page/n0/mode/2up

Issues 48-52. It clearly confuses the search engines as well, and the covers are the same apart from the numbers.

So from issue 48, is a listing of the first nine venues and the winners (bit silly to miss that, it was hiding in plain sight):