TORRE GETS HALL OF FAME NOMINATION
Filipino chess legend Eugene Torre has been nominated to the World Chess Hall of Fame, becoming the first Asian male to be conferred such honor.
Torre, who will turn 70 in November, joins Polish-Argentine Grandmaster (GM) Miguel Najdorf and GM Judit Polgar of Hungary as 2020 nominees of the World Chess Federation (FIDE), according to top official Casto Abundo Jr. in a Viber message.
The FIDE historical committee composed of chair Willy Iclicki of Belgium, Andrzej Filipowicz of Poland, Berik Balgabaev of Kazakhstan and Abundo nominated them before being approved by the FIDE Council.
“It’s a great honor to be included in the revered list of names who I hold in high esteem. This, I share with my countrymen,” Torre, who became Asia’s first GM in 1974, said.
Najdorf, who died in 1997 at the age of 87, was the world’s leading player in the 1940s and 1950s and popularized a Sicilian variation named after him. He reached peak ELO rating of 2540 in 1972.
Polgar, 44, is generally considered as the strongest female chess player of all time with a peak rating of 2735 and world ranking of No. 8 in 2005.
Torre holds the record of most Chess Olympiad appearances — 25 from 1970 to 2018, including 23 as a player.
He won the silver in board one behind then world champion Anatoly Karpov in the 1974 Nice Olympiad and three bronze medals.
Torre considers his 2016 bronze medal as his strongest performance at board one, the same year GM Wesley So took the gold playing for the United States.
“I had a performance rating of over 2800 on nine wins and two draws,” Torre, who acted as coach in 2008 and 2018, recalled.
Not including the last two Olympiads, Torre played 259 matches, winning 94, drawing 122 and losing 43 for a success rate of 59.8 percent.
He ranks second only to Lajos Portisch of Hungary in games played in the Olympiad.
It’s a great honor to be included in the revered list of names who I hold in high esteem. This, I share with my countrymen.
Torre, who reached a peak rating of 2580 and went as high as 17th in the world rankings, played on the top board during the Philippines’ best finish in the Olympiad — seventh in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1988.
He shared first place with Portisch in the 1982 Toluca Interzonal, advancing him to the Candidate Matches for the 1984 world championship.
But Torre lost to Zoltan Ribli, 6-4, in the quarterfinals.
Among the thousands of games he played, Torre considers his two victories over then world champion Anatoly Karpov of the Soviet Union as his most memorable.
“At that time, Tolya (Karpov’s nickname) was invincible and rarely lost a match,” Torre, who first defeated the Russian legend in 1976 and repeated in 1984, said.
Rivals since their junior days, Karpov still leads Torre in head-to-head matches, 4-2 with five draws.