Two decades of IBM tournament: the heyday of Dutch tournament chess
- Peter Doggers
- 1 day ago
- 18 min read
Twenty strong, annual chess tournaments in a row in Amsterdam, for two decades, made possible by a major sponsor of international fame. It sounds too good to be true for our little country, but it was reality between 1961 and 1981. In the article below you will find the history of the famous IBM tournaments.
As I argue in my book The Chess Revolution, chess has perhaps never been as popular as it is today – also in the Netherlands. At the same time, we cannot say that the tournament calendar is in any way similar to that of half a century ago, when chess was also on the rise thanks to the Fischer-Spassky match. The list of sponsors who made the many strong Dutch tournaments possible at the time is dizzying.
In an article in the anniversary book Schaakland vol verhalen, in honor of 150 years of the Dutch Chess Federation, Tata Steel Chess tournament director Jeroen van den Berg listed the most important ones: “Hoogovens (later Corus/Tata), IBM (later OHRA), VSB, Interpolis, Niemeyer/Gasunie, Friesche Vlag (Dutch Championships), V&D (simultaneous tour), Aegon (human versus computer), AVRO (international tournaments and Dutch Championships) Philips, KRO,” and added that there were more.
Tata Steel Chess is still the most important annual chess event today in the Netherlands, followed by the open tournaments in Maastricht, Vlissingen, Dieren, Hoogeveen and Amsterdam and the weekend tournaments. In some of these open tournaments, the field of participants has generally not become stronger, to say the least.
Especially considering the turbulent times in which the main sponsor of the annual festival in Wijk aan Zee finds itself, it is not an unnecessary luxury to realize a beautiful, new, large Dutch chess tournament. The Amsterdam Chess Open (where I acted as press officer in 2024) is perhaps the most ambitious event at the moment as a weekend tournament and who knows what beautiful things could grow from this.
For inspiration, for anyone who wishes the Dutch chess world a new, fresh future, as a participant, referee, organizer or perhaps potential sponsor, below is a piece about one of those absolute top tournaments that the Netherlands has known, in that heyday of our sport: the IBM tournament. Because, what the IBM tournament committee advocated, now more than sixty years ago when this tournament was founded, actually still applies: top chess and Amsterdam belong together.
Dirk Goes initially did extensive research that I gratefully made use of.
How it started
The very first edition was held from 24 May to 6 June 1961, mainly organised by members of the Amsterdam chess club VAS. This club pulled off a stunt in the 1960-1961 season when their second(!) team became Dutch champions. They had a closed group in mind in which strong club members would have a chance of achieving a master result, and they succeeded with flying colours. Mechanical engineering student and VAS member Kick Langeweg started with 8/8 and had already secured the result with his seventh victory. He eventually won the tournament with 9/11, half a point more than J.H. Donner.
An important force behind this first and subsequent tournaments was Berry Withuis, a tireless and, I believe, hardly surpassed predecessor in chess journalism. Withuis was involved in many Dutch tournaments and often played alone for the ‘press service’. I did not know him personally (he died in 2009) but he seems to me to have been an extremely hard worker whose main goal was to help chess, like Sagar Shah of ChessBase India is today.
(Wim Andriessen later wrote about the eleventh edition in Schaakbulletin: “It is nice to be in the press room. Everyone casually starts a conversation with press officer Berry Withuis, because he manages the consumption vouchers.”)
For the first edition, Withuis managed to get ƒ 5,000 from IBM, which amounts to about € 20,000 today, corrected for inflation. The American automation company had been active in the Netherlands since 1920, as part of IBM World Trade Corporation, which included all IBM departments outside the US. In the early sixties, IBM had almost two thousand employees in the Netherlands and produced electronic calculating punch machines and electric typewriters. It helped that Wim Ruth, head of Public Relations at IBM, was a chess enthusiast (he would also be chairman of the Dutch Chess Federation between 1970 and 1974).
A nice detail here is that the draw was performed by an IBM computer, which remained a logical tradition. Withuis wrote in the tournament bulletin in 1965: “The highlight may well be called the activity of the ‘computer’, which electronic phenomenon could hardly be ‘understood’ by those present, but whose ‘capabilities’ were demonstrated extremely clearly. The draw, which Minister Vrolijk elicited from the instrument, after simply pressing a button, brought to light the complete table of round division, dating, ‘name-for-name’ etc...”
The tournament was called the VAS/IBM tournament and was played in the canteen of the IBM office on Johan Huizingalaan in Amsterdam-West. Adjourned games were played in the Amsterdam Chess House on Henri Polaklaan.
The group of twelve players had two grandmasters (J.H. Donner and Ossip Bernstein) and three masters (Jens Enevoldsen, Robert Wade and Hans Johner). The later tournament director Willem-Jan Wolthuis also participated. To allow for master norms, a quarter of the participants had to have a title and no more than half plus one could come from the Netherlands. This was tricky because Hiong Liong Tan, who had studied in the Netherlands since 1956 and still played for Indonesia, had recently become champion of the Netherlands. Was he Dutch or Indonesian?
At 78, Franco-Russian Bernstein was the oldest participant and fell asleep regularly. He scored two draws and nine losses. This did not spoil his fun, according to Withuis: “Afterwards he declared that this tournament – in which he won fewer points than his game plan occasionally suggested – had been the best of his life. He loved being able to converse in all the languages of the world, to shine in table speeches and to argue with ‘that young Euwe’ about time pressure and games from the twenties.”
The first tournament director was Wim Misset, at the time also director of the Amsterdam Chess Federation. When extra groups and nine-round events for amateurs were added in later years, Misset was the one who advocated the promotion and relegation regulations in the various groups, as we still know them in Wijk aan Zee.
From the very beginning, the main sponsor was very ambitious. During the closing ceremony, drs. J.A. van de Kamp on behalf of IBM stated that the aim of making the tournament a tradition would be considered by the company's management. He literally said: "Whatever it costs, oh, that's what it costs."
Whatever it costs, oh, that's what it costs. —J.A. van de Kamp, IBM
The tournament grows
The second tournament, this time held in August, was expanded with subgroups and thus had about a hundred participants in total. The amateurs played in the evening from 19:30 to 23:30 hrs while the main group played during the day. Coffee was free.
The main group, again with twelve players, was won by the aforementioned Tan and the Polish-Israeli master Moshe Czerniak. In addition, the fifteen-year-old Robbie Hartoch attracted attention, “whose theoretical knowledge was inadequate, but whose positional feeling functioned like a radar,” according to Withuis.
The third edition saw for the first time both a grandmaster group (first prize ƒ 1000,-, now approx. € 3,850) and a master group (ƒ 400,-, now approx. € 1500), both groups of ten. In addition, there were ten extra nine-round events (two reserve groups and eight subgroups) with a total of 120 participants. The 26-year-old Hungarian Lajos Portisch won, but lost one game, to the then 39-year-old Johan Barendregt.
In 1964, the year that Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize and the Beatles started to conquer the US after the United Kingdom with their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Dane Bent Larsen won the grandmaster group.
Schakend Nederland, the magazine of the Dutch Chess Federation, described him aptly: “One could be convinced in advance that he would do everything he could to claim first place here too. And he succeeded, in exactly the same stubborn style, without fear, with a good portion of risk in his game, but never so much that one would think of daredevilry.” Larsen himself claimed to have been lost in at least seven of the nine games and was therefore not satisfied. Donner came second in the grandmaster group with half a point less.
A year later, Donner did manage to claim first prize with a score of 6.5/9, half a point more than the Slovenian-Yugoslav Bruno Parma. This year, an ‘ideal’ field of participants was achieved: five grandmasters and five masters, including five Dutch and five foreigners, following the example of Hastings.
Schakend Nederland was very pleased with sponsor IBM: “Remarkable is the actual support that IBM-Netherlands gives to this tournament. Not only financially, however important, but also and above all in unpretentious yet effective organizational support, with full understanding of the needs and requirements of the chess masters. You rarely see something like that.”
Soviet players come to Amsterdam
In the summer of 1966, Soviet players were on the list of participants for the first time: Mikhail Botvinnik and Salo Flohr. Former world champion Botvinnik, now 54, won the tournament convincingly with 7.5/9, but lost to Barendregt, who had also claimed the only win over the winner three years earlier. The Dutch psychologist, who was still studying with Adriaan de Groot, surprised Botvinnik on the second move with 1.e4 c6 2.Ne2!?.
This year, for the first time, there were fixed starting fees. Grandmasters received ƒ 500 (now approx. €1675), masters ƒ 300 (now approx. €1000), and travel expenses were reimbursed. The lower groups still played in the canteen of the IBM building on Johan Huizingalaan, but this year the grandmaster and master group moved to the Dutch Reformed Church 'De Ark' in the Van Ollefenstraat in Amsterdam-West. Flohr said about this: "Why in a church building? Now I have to be peaceful. Next time, would you rather take a synagogue, then at least I can play for a win without a care in the world!"
Why in a church building? Now I have to be peaceful. Next time, would you rather take a synagogue, then at least I can play for a win without a care in the world! —Salo Flohr
While San Francisco celebrated the Summer of Love, Hungarian Lajos Portisch won the top group in July 1967 and scored a grandmaster norm. For the first time since the second edition, the grandmaster group had twelve participants; the master group remained at ten.
The opening included a few words from alderman for sports affairs Harry Verheij, after whom a well-known sports hall in Amsterdam is named where many chess tournaments were later held. He hinted that the Amsterdam council wanted to recognize chess as a sport (in which case it could be included in the sports budget!) and that it was convinced of the creative nature of the game. That was well spotted at the time!
Highest FIDE status
1968 was the year of the Prague Spring, the iconic Beatles album 'Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band' and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. It was also the first year that the IBM tournament achieved the highest FIDE status, namely 1A: a tournament with at least eight grandmasters. With sixteen players, the group was larger than ever; the master group had twelve. The playing hall had been the Cartesius Lyceum on Piet Mondriaanstraat for a few years, but this year it was for the last time.
Then Lubomir (later Lubosh) Kavalek won the tournament and the first prize of now ƒ 2,500 (now approx. € 7675). A month later, after the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and he had played a tournament in Poland, he decided not to return to his homeland but to choose a future in the West.
At the time, Schakend Nederland wrote about David Bronstein, almost world champion in 1951 and second in the tournament with half a point less than Kavalek: “...the friendliest, most brilliant but also most childish chess player one can imagine. An ordinary person cannot understand that he sometimes rejects an obvious winning continuation ‘because it is too banal for a grandmaster.’ But beware: despite such statements, this little man plays incredibly easily and deeply.”
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong set his first steps on the moon while the ninth IBM tournament was taking place in Amsterdam. It had grown into a tournament of caliber with eleven grandmasters (three more than was needed for 1A status!) in the main group and eight masters in the master group.
A large playing hall was required for this, and this became the Glass Hall of the ‘new’ RAI convention center (which had air conditioning!) on the Europaplein, which had opened in 1961. Portisch won the tournament for the third time. The Ukrainian Leonid Stein only shared fourth place with the Croatian Mato Damjanovic.
Ree wrote in Schaakbulletin that Stein’s failure was no surprise. “There seems to be a curse on his performances abroad, but apart from that, we have recently become accustomed to the fact that Russian grandmasters no longer win all the tournaments they enter, except for old fighters like Botvinnik and Smyslow, who are made of different stuff than that weak card-playing people of the post-de-Stalinization era.”
1970, the Beatles called it a day and the IBM tournament celebrated its tenth anniversary with a top line-up. Reigning world champion Boris Spassky was present and won together with his compatriot Lev Poloegajewski. The Dutch participants were unable to make a difference; the later popular chess commentator Lex Jongsma came last.
Elo ratings
The following year, the top spots were also occupied by big names, Vasily Smyslov and Paul Keres, which indicated how strong the IBM tournament had become. It was also the first tournament of allure, worldwide, that counted towards the FIDE ratings, which were introduced on 1 July 1971. Eddie Scholl, the Dutch champion of 1970, had a remarkable tournament: he drew with the two tournament winners and with Svetozar Gligoric and Wolfgang Uhlmann, but lost the rest.
The then nineteen-year-old Jan Timman made his debut in the highest group and finished in thirteenth place. Apparently he was quoted saying that he was “not suited for these kinds of tournaments and would stop for the time being.” Little did he know that nine years later he would be ranked second in the world...
In the meantime, Willem-Jan Wolthuis, who had participated in the first edition in 1961, had taken over the role of tournament director from Wim Misset. Also new was the introduction of the four-player groups in the evenings, where book vouchers of ƒ 12.50 and ƒ 7.50 (now approx. € 33 and € 20) could be won. (Today, the prizes in the amateur groups in Wijk aan Zee are still book vouchers.) Furthermore, we know from this year that there were no fewer than five hundred spectators during the last round. Chess was popular!
The twelfth edition, again won by a Soviet duo (Polugaevsky this time together with Viktor Korchnoi), was held from 29 May to 17 June 1972. This was earlier in the year than normal, because of the Fischer-Spassky match.
The players signed a declaration advocating for the May 31 round to start an hour earlier in connection with the European Cup I final, Ajax-Inter, played in Rotterdam. There were enough Amsterdammers in the field who wanted to see (and saw) Ajax win the cup with the big ears for the second time!
Tigran Petrosjan and Albert Planinc won the 1973 edition together, which set a record with 1300 visitors on the final day. Special women's four-way matches were also introduced this year. The winner in the highest group, Rie Timmer, qualified for one of the reserve groups.
After the tournament, there was a simultaneous exhibition for children aged ten to twenty in the RAl, delivered by fifteen participants of the IBM tournament. Five hundred children came, even from Belgium and Denmark.
In 1974, Eric Clapton’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ was the big hit, Mohammed Ali defeated George Foreman in the ‘Rumble of the Jungle’ and Richard Nixon resigned as president of the US following the Watergate scandal. In Amsterdam, the Serbian Borislav Ivkov, the Czech Vlastimil Jansa and the Ukrainian Vladimir Tukmakov won. Last-minute substitute Ivkov won on tiebreak, despite having to leave one round before the end due to commitments elsewhere (he was Slavoljub Marjanovic's second at the youth world championship).
A year later, the first prize (ƒ 4000,-, now approx. € 7685) was won by one of the most beautiful names on the circuit, Ljubomir Ljubojevic, with a score of 9.5/15. This year, the organizers experimented with a number of four-player youth events, with a total of more than six hundred participants, 370 in the nine-round events and more than two hundred in the four-player events. Hans Böhm was very successful this year: he shared second place with 9/15.
Ambitious sponsor
In the same year 1975, Schaakbulletin published an interview by Alexander Münninghoff with tournament director Willem-Jan Wolthuis, also chairman of the Amsterdam chess club VAS. Wolthuis himself worked for Amro (the Amsterdam-Rotterdam Bank, which would merge with Algemene Bank Nederland in 1991 to form ABN AMRO). Münninghoff, who used the funny word ‘counting machine syndicate’ for IBM, managed to get him to say that the total costs for IBM were around a quarter of a million (now around €480,000).
“What do you get in return? A lot of goodwill, that’s the first thing,” Wolthuis explained. “That applies to Hoogovens, as an environmentally polluting industry, perhaps even more so than to us. And then certainly also the advertising aspect, that is connected to such a tournament. In three weeks your name appears in the newspaper, on the radio or on TV about 1500 times. Just calculate how much that would normally have cost you."
What do you get in return? A lot of goodwill, that’s the first thing. That applies to Hoogovens, as an environmentally polluting industry, perhaps even more so than to us. —Willem-Jan Wolthuis in 1975
Wolthuis went on to say that the starting fees depended on the Elo ratings of the players. “We are not yet subject to the Fischer effect, although I think we will have to move in that direction in the future, in moderation.”
But ambition was still there: “It is already the case that we honor all complaints from foreign grandmasters. Hotel accommodation, pocket money, playing hall: that has long since reached a level where we will not compromise anymore, at most it can still be improved. It will also happen that, if a strong foreign grandmaster declines because he finds it too meager financially, we will consider offering the man more. After all, we are among the ten strongest tournaments in the world, and we want to remain that way.”
In the last five years, under Wolthuis, the tournament had grown from two hundred to over six hundred participants. The Hoogovens tournament then had around eight hundred. There was a good relationship between the two; the same chess material (boards, pieces and demonstration boards) was used in both tournaments.
The growth continues
In 1976 there were almost seven hundred participants from twenty countries. The tournament was won by Viktor Korchnoi and a 21-year-old Tony Miles. Afterwards Korchnoi went into hiding and applied for political asylum with the immigration service of the Dutch police. He would eventually settle in Switzerland and lose two matches for the world title to Anatoly Karpov.
In the summer of 1977, Star Wars was playing in cinemas for the first time, Elvis Presley died and Leonid Brezhnev became the new leader of the Soviet Union. Tony Miles won the IBM tournament again. Minze bij de Weg began his report in Schaakbulletin with the beautiful sentence: “When Tony Miles travels to the IBM tournament at the end of June, accompanied by his ever sour-looking girlfriend Jana H., who was stolen from another English top chess player, this will already be the seventh grandmaster tournament in which he will show his face this year.”
The now 65-year-old former world class player Samuel Reshevsky participated in the grandmaster group, where the first prize had grown to ƒ 5,000 (approx. € 8,000). As always, he did not want to play on Saturdays because of his Jewish faith; the other participants agreed, sometimes grumbling. (He played the missed games on the rest days.) J.H. Donner turned fifty during the tournament and played well with a fifty percent score.
Remarkably enough, no Russians participated this year, which probably had to do with the incident with Korchnoi the year before. It was not until 1984, at Hoogovens, that the Russians would again send participants to a tournament in which Korchnoi participated.
A special youth tournament was added to this edition, with some 270 participants up to the age of sixteen, bringing the total to around a thousand participants. This was probably the first time that this was more than at Hoogovens. Dutch chess was doing well, because in the same year the annual top tournament in Tilburg sponsored by Interpolis was also launched.
Dutch success
In 1978, for the first time, there were no grandmaster group and master group, but two grandmaster groups (A and B), both with fourteen players. In addition, there was a reserve master group and sub-tournaments with 460 participants and another 420 in the youth groups. With almost a thousand participants, the tournament was again clearly larger than Hoogovens.
For the first time since Donner's victory in 1965, there was Dutch success on home soil: Jan Timman finished as the winner for the first time, a full point ahead of the Hungarian talent and eventual candidate for the world championship Zoltan Ribli. The young Russian and also eventual candidate for the world championship Artur Jussupow convincingly won the B group.
Incidentally, the first Dutch chess stamp was also issued during the tournament (worth 40 cents), fulfilling a promise that the Dutch postal service had already made to Max Euwe in 1935!
1979 was the year of the Iranian Revolution, the Sony Walkman and Margaret Thatcher coming to power in Great Britain. Vlastimil Hort and Gyula Sax shared the victory in 1979, again a ‘festival’ with around a thousand participants. The lower groups were not decathlons this time but groups of twenty people playing Swiss.
The sponsor suddenly stops
In early 1980 IBM suddenly announced that after twenty years it would discontinue the sponsorship. This happened without consulting the tournament committee and the news hit like a bombshell. At that time the budget was between ƒ 350,000 and ƒ 400,000 (between approx. € 485,000 and € 554,000 today) and there was a lot of incomprehension about the unexpectedness of the decision.
All this happened at the height of the event, because the last regular tournament of 1980 was the strongest edition ever. For the first time there was a crown group (a double-round eight-match), won by Anatoli Karpov, one point ahead of Jan Timman. The Dutchman remained undefeated; Karpov only lost to Ribli.
In the grandmaster group Hans Ree won, who had a better tiebreak than Wolfgang Unzicker, but he (again) came up half a point short of a grandmaster result. Wim Andriessen wrote in Schaakbulletin: “Things are going from bad to worse with Ree. He used to get the praise he deserved, but in recent years he seems to have developed into the crazy boy in class, who always stands out at the wrong times.” Fortunately, the ‘crazy boy’ still became a grandmaster and a great writer.
1981. Ronald Reagan survived an attack on his life, the Space Shuttle was launched for the first time, Bob Marley died and Doe Maar broke through in the Netherlands with the hit 'Sinds 1 dag of 2 (32 jaar)'. A 'memorial tournament' was held in Amsterdam with the participation of former winners, supplemented by Ree. Furthermore, the financing of the youth tournament was provisionally extended by three years by IBM, which was more than reasonable.
Foreign participants were surprised that the Netherlands could organize a tournament without including the very strong grandmaster Genna Sosonko in the field of participants, but to be fair, Genna had never won the tournament.
The memorial tournament was played in May 1981 and not in July because the organizers absolutely wanted Karpov joining. He would possibly play a match for the world championship against Korchnoi in July. For the occasion, they returned to the IBM building on the Johan Huizingalaan. During this edition, Euwe celebrated his eightieth birthday and gave a simul.
Karpov surprisingly lost to Hort in the first round, in which Timman, now aged 29, won against Donner for the first time with black. He managed to maintain the lead and eventually won, ahead of Karpov, who celebrated his thirtieth birthday during the tournament. Berry Withuis wrote about the game: “The highlight of the final phase was Karpov-Timman, a duel such as one rarely sees. The white player made a piece sacrifice of unusual venom, Timman defended along a ruler. A beautiful fight, which ended in a draw; one should organize tours to such draws.”
‘Promovendus’ Ree did well with 6/11 and victories over Tony Miles and Lev Polugajewski. This time, Schaakbulletin came up with words of praise: “Actually, it is nonsense to speak of a ‘surprise’, because it is simply the level at which Ree is currently.”
On some days, there were more than five hundred spectators, who made the IBM building bulge. Schaakbulletin wrote about this: “The organization had to hastily bring in monitors to enable them to still have a look at the players. They had not counted on such a large audience. It was unprecedented.”
The conclusion that followed still applies: “All this showed once again that Amsterdam must try to keep a major chess event within its borders.”
OHRA takes over
That same year, the Foundation Chess Amsterdam was established, consisting of representatives of the tournament committee, the Dutch Chess Federation and the Amsterdam Chess Federation, supplemented by a number of experts. They managed to tap into the local government and various companies (including OHRA and IBM) for funding.
In 1982, the tournament continued without a main sponsor, but hundreds of amateurs were able to take their places behind the pieces again, this time in the Sporthal Zuid on the Jollenpad, close to the Olympic stadium. This ensured the much-cherished continuity, although it was clear that the loss of IBM had a major impact. The chess players complained about the high entry fee (ƒ 100 for seven games in the A group, which would amount to approximately € 122 today) and the high prices of refreshments.
A year later, in July 1983, the tournament was renamed the OHRA chess tournament, with the Arnhem insurance company as the main sponsor. They returned to the RAI, where groups of 10 players no longer existed, but a nine-round Swiss instead, with 32 players in a grandmaster group. Vlastimil Hort and Nigel Short shared the first prize; the latter scored his first grandmaster norm. OHRA would remain involved in top chess until 1990.
In the nineties we saw three years with a Donner Memorial (1994-1996) and later the Lost Boys Tournament (1999-2002). This was followed by the Amsterdam Chess Tournament, which has been a household name in the summer holidays for over a decade now, but, as mentioned, has considerably weakened in terms of level in the meantime.
The current ‘chess revolution’ is a suitable moment to do something about this. It is time for a new collaboration with a large, prestigious company. A company that knows how to appreciate the eternal value of chess in society. The history of the IBM tournaments teaches us that Amsterdam and top chess belong together.
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