The fourth and final volume of FM Hans Renette and IM Tibor Karolyi’s treatise on the life and games of Viktor Korchnoi will surprise you. Covering the period from 1992 until the maestro’s death in 2016 at the age of 85, it contains a bumper 208 highly instructive games and fragments. Fighting games, attacks, endgames, theoretical battles, time scrambles, classical and rapid it has the lot.
And Korchnoi was no weakling in his incredible late career! He won the category 16 Madrid tournament in 1995 at the age of 64 ahead of Short, Salov, Yusupov, Polgar and Timman among others. His first place at Sarajevo in 1998 saw him achieve a tournament performance rating of 2831 at the age of 67. He was the highest-rated 70-year old ever with an Elo of 2639 in 2001. In that same year he won the category 17 double-round robin tournament at Biel, ahead of Gelfand, Svidler, Lautier, Grischuk and Pelletier. In 2004 he achieved a tournament performance rating of nearly 2800 in the city of Paks, Hungary, at the age of 73.
Viktor was still unleashing opening novelties in his late 70s, playing tournaments around the world and winning some of them. Notably, he was World Senior Champion in 2006 and was ranked in the world’s top hundred as late as 2007, when aged 75. He became Swiss champion for the fifth time in 2011 at the age of 80 and he even introduced a novelty in a game with Uhlmann in 2015 when aged almost 84.
This book contains games against Magnus Carlsen (whom he beat in 2004), Fabiano Caruana (whom he beat in 2011), Kasparov, Karpov, Spassky, Gelfand, Timman, Short, Ponomariov, Yusupov, Svidler, Uhlmann, Hort, Beliavsky, Piket, Speelman, Tiviakov, Adams, Sadler, Romanishin, Vallejo, Vasiukov, Sutovsky, Gashimov, Ashley, and the legendary trainer Mark Dvoretsky among many others.
It also contains 80 tournament and family photos, the vast majority of them published in a book for the first time. This book comes in B/W paperback, B/W hardback and full-colour hardback. In the full-colour version of the book, 70 of these photos are in colour.
