For the Tenth Time at Golden Sands

When a tournament is held for the tenth time, one can speak of more than mere tradition. Because the strongest Bulgarian players regularly take part, the accumulated results make it possible to observe broader tendencies in the development of Bulgarian chess.

At the beginning of the series there had been Bulgarian victories, by Milko Bobotsov in the first event and Nikola Padevsky in the second. In the later tournaments, however, outright Bulgarian victories disappeared and even places among the top three became increasingly rare. Overall scoring declined, short draws became more frequent and the ambition to fight for the top of the table seemed to diminish.

The resort setting cannot be blamed, because it applies equally to the foreign guests. The deeper problem, in the author's view, lay in the competitive habits formed by domestic qualifying and selection events. Players learned to calculate the minimum score required for a norm or for selection to a team: two wins and draws in the remaining games might be enough. Because draws involve less risk, such a strategy became deeply rooted.

A second problem was fear of the opening. Bulgarian players had long been told that they lagged behind in opening preparation, and efforts had been made to collect information on future opponents and improve access to chess literature. Yet simply possessing the latest information could not create an advantage if the same information was also available to competitors. What was missing was independent analytical work.

The author recalled that in the early 1950s Bulgaria's emerging masters had developed their own theoretical ideas: Minev's work in the Jaenisch Gambit, Balabanov's ideas in the Spanish, systems in the Sicilian used by Padevsky and Minev, Padevsky's work in the Scotch Game, and Zdravko Milev's analysis in the Gruenfeld and Saemisch King's Indian. Such independent work had become increasingly rare and, worse, much of the older Bulgarian theoretical heritage was no longer known to the younger generation.

Another weakness was the tendency to judge players almost exclusively by their final place in the table. Successes were not studied deeply enough, failures were treated as private matters and creative content was often ignored. In that environment it was hardly surprising that players chose safe draws: they rarely led to disaster and two or three successful "strikes" could guarantee a respectable result. But the long-term danger was a degradation of style.

Georgi Daskalov