MARK RUBERY CHESS

In the 1970’s the American player Ken Rogoff dropped out of school and quickly obtained his grandmaster title, but what was more remarkable was that he later returned to university and embarked on a career in economics that was to dwarf his chess accomplishments. In a recent interview with Chessbase he explained what was behind the following bizarre game with Robert Huebner.

Huebner,Robert (2590) - Rogoff,Kenneth (2430) [A15]

WchT U26 17th Graz (8), 1972 1.c4 Nf6 2.Nf3 g6 3.Ng1 Bg7 4.Qa4 0–0 5.Qxd7 Qxd7 6.g4 Qxd2+ 7.Kxd2 Nxg4 8.b4 a5 9.a4 Bxa1 10.Bb2 Nc6 11.Bh8 Bg7 12.h4 axb4

0.5-0.5

‘I think the real story was that Huebner had played a really important game against Karpov the round before and lost. It was a fantastic game by Karpov, if I’m remembering — he was white and just squeezed Huebner.

He was emotionally exhausted because that was a very important game, and so — and this is just how I understood it — he told his team captain, ‘I don’t want to play’ and the team captain said, ‘well that’s silly, you’re white you can play first board, shift everybody else a board down and that helps us a lot. If you’re too tired, just make a draw.’

Huebner, playing white against a much lower rated player felt insulted to be making a draw so he wanted it to be very clear that he was just doing it for the team, and so he played one move and offered a draw. And I should have refused it — I made a mistake — but I went to my team captain — I think it was Benko — and I said, what do I do? And Benko said, ‘you got to be kidding, take a draw’ and so I did. I shouldn’t have. Then rejecting the draw they made us play something and then he started playing suicide moves. They made us apologise, and so we played again. He again started playing suicide moves. I played suicide moves back. By this time everyone was standing on every table watching the game instead of playing their own games. I think I had more pieces at the end, but we agreed to a draw again. And this time the tournament director said we’re going to forfeit both of you — quite rightly — we were both wrong. I didn’t know how to react when he was doing that, you know I had a lot of respect for him, and just didn’t handle it well. And then basically the third time I think I apologised and he didn’t and I think I won by forfeit in the end. And probably the correct decision was to forfeit both of us.’