Scholl and Zuidema finish level in the battle for the national title

Langeweg third – five leading players absent – Kerkhoff discovers an improvement in a Spanish Game.

Leeuwarden, 4 April 1970. The national championship, held in Leeuwarden from 23 March to 4 April under the name “Friese Vlag Toernooi”, did not produce a decision. Scholl and Zuidema finished side by side at the top with 8½ points each. According to the regulations, they will now play a six-game match for the title, and if that again fails to produce a decision, play will continue until the first subsequent decisive game.

It is striking that Langeweg again failed to win the title this year, although, on the basis of pure talent and insight, he could certainly have been regarded beforehand as the player with the best chances in this field. Even before the start of the final round, his prospects were already very doubtful, because he had failed to build on a favourable starting position: six draws against six weaker opponents had left him half a point behind his rivals Scholl and Zuidema. He did have the advantage of facing Scholl in the final round, but he found himself in the unenviable position of having to win if he was to keep his chances alive. And even then Zuidema would have had to fail to beat Marcus. Nor would the title yet have been Langeweg’s, because if the latter game had ended in a draw, he would first have had to play a deciding match against Zuidema.

People are often inclined to regard such final-round games as the sole cause of a player’s better or worse placing. That is of course only partly correct. What can one expect when the starting position is already so poor that one can only hope for a miracle of the kind just described? And that miracle did not occur. Langeweg had to bow to Scholl, while Zuidema had little difficulty defeating Marcus.

Modest field

Although this championship deserves high praise from the sporting point of view because of the intensity of the struggle, it should not be overlooked that the field was considerably weakened by the absence of no fewer than five leading national players. It is perhaps useful to point out that they all had perfectly respectable reasons for not taking part: Ree is in the process of completing his university studies, Jan Timman has to sit his final examinations, Kuijpers and Bouwmeester could not obtain leave because of their professional commitments, while Hein Donner badly needed some rest between the tournament in Lugano and the grandmaster tournament at Oegstgeest that was about to begin. Understandable and acceptable excuses! It is nevertheless unfortunate that such a cluster of justified absences had to occur in one and the same tournament.

There is, however, something else to be said. It is becoming increasingly clear that so many tournaments are nowadays being organised that it is difficult, and sometimes even impossible, to provide all of them with the kind of field that the organisers would consider desirable.

This is primarily an international problem. Major tournaments are springing up like mushrooms and overlap more and more frequently. As a result, the world’s leading masters are subjected—whether deliberately or not—to an increasingly intensive exploitation of their talent. It is simply no longer conceivable that international top players can travel from tournament to tournament and, on top of that, continue to deliver peak performances.

On a more modest scale the problem also exists nationally. We possess a respectable group of leading players, most of whom would be more than welcome in any national championship. But the majority of them have only a limited amount of time available for playing in longer tournaments, because they are tied to the obligations of their profession. Even if their employers now and then grant them some “extra leave”, there are obviously clear limits to such generosity.

We are fortunate to have two major international tournaments within our borders that can be marked on the tournament calendar every year: the Hoogovens tournament and the IBM tournament. It is understandable that the organisers attach importance to having as many leading Dutch players as possible on their entry lists. These tournaments also involve financial compensation and prizes, which are naturally important in determining the choices made by the leading players. They simply cannot always be everywhere.

The situation did not improve when the Board of the KNSB, partly at the urging of the C.C.F. (Coöperatieve Condensfabriek Friesland), which has now organised the national championship for the KNSB for the second successive time in an excellent manner, decided to hold the national championship every year instead of once every two years. This placed an additional burden on the non-professional Dutch leading players. The question is whether this decision—in view of the problems outlined above—was really a wise one.

However that may be, it seems urgently necessary for the KNSB to address this problem and try to find an acceptable way out of what is becoming an increasingly serious impasse. Two possibilities seem obvious:

1. consultation with the organisers of the Hoogovens and IBM tournaments in order to achieve a certain spreading of Dutch top players across these events;
2. consultation with the Dutch leading players themselves, naturally with the same objective.