A celebration of chess

In May, Peter Doggers published the excellent overview article "Two Decades of IBM Tournaments: The Heyday of Dutch Tournament Chess" on this site. And indeed, the years 1961 through 1981 were a golden age for chess in Amsterdam—because Amsterdam is what it's all about—although Peter apparently doesn't want to be too chauvinistic and rather generously credits "Dutch tournament chess."

Those glory days didn't end when IBM discontinued sponsoring in 1981. An OHRA tournament took its place, later a Donner Memorial, and later still a Lost Boys tournament and an Amsterdam Chess Tournament (ACT). Almost all of these tournaments maintained IBM's basic formula of broad participation. Not just the elite, but (in principle) everyone should be able to participate. They were true chess festivals, like the IBM tournament had been, and like the tournament of tournaments, Hoogovens/Corus/Tata Steel, which had been, is, and hopefully will be for a long time to come.

From 1987 to 1996, the VSB tournament was also held. This was a double-round, four-player round-robin tournament for the world's top players, without lower groups and so, yes, only for the elite. It was a chess festival nonetheless, because public interest was enormous and demonstrated once again how chess was alive in Amsterdam. It was held in the VSB office on the Singel canal, and for a while the tourist crowds of the nearby Bloemenmarkt faded into the background, supplanted as they were by the even larger crowd of chess enthusiasts. But after that, it went quiet, although the ACT tournament remained, gradually declining in importance, in the summer.

When I ever talk to someone knowledgeable about this impoverishment of tournament life in the Dutch capital, the reason often cited is the increasingly difficult sponsorship climate. The mentality has changed, the way companies are structured, the way they approach sponsorship—in short, everything has changed, and not to our advantage. There's also increased competition in the sponsorship market. Everyone's looking for sponsorship these days, and chess rarely takes priority.

Yet, I think it's also, and perhaps even more so, about the people, the organizers. A lot of effort simply has to be put into organizing a tournament. That's often overlooked.

When I was still playing chess myself, I always overlooked it too. Tournaments—I just played them and never thought about what the organizers had done to make them possible. Only when something wasn't right did I know where to find them. But since I retired as a chess player, my perspective has broadened. I now see more of the person behind the chess player and also behind the organizer, who, after all, is always a chess player too. And so I now better understand and appreciate how much time, energy, and enthusiasm it takes to make a tournament run smoothly.

The author of this article in a game Anatoly Karpov at the 1988 Hoogovens Tournament. Photo: Rob Bogaerts/Dutch National Archives.

And now, since 2023, there's the Amsterdam Chess Open (ACO), a new and rapidly growing weekend tournament with the potential to become even bigger. Peter Doggers concluded his story with the bold statement, "The history of the IBM tournaments teaches us that Amsterdam and top chess belong together." The unexpectedly large number of participants in the first two editions of the ACO confirm the validity of this statement. And they show that even in today's much more digital chess world, an over-the-board tournament still has great added value. People meet each other, they inspire and encourage each other; I'd almost say (but I know I'm going too far) that people love each other. That's quite different from online chess, however much that form of chess has now amply proven its right to exist.

But a chess tournament is also always a chess festival, a celebration of chess. Amsterdam, that great city, is an ideal location for such a festival. The massive influx of participants from towns and villages, from home and abroad, proves that the ACO has everything it takes to revive Amsterdam's tradition as a chess city.

I'm curious. It certainly won't be the organizers' fault; they're doing a great job. Do I wish them success? Success has already happened. But I wish it nonetheless.