The Province Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Saturday, September 04, 1971 - Page 45
Chess Congress - Argentina Gets Nod For Finals by Paul Raugust
Buenos Aires, Argentina, Friday was awarded the final match of the world chess championship challengers' series by the World Chess Federation.
The match, between Bobby Fischer of New York and Tigran Petrosian of the Soviet Union, is to begin Sept. 30. Winner of the best-of-10 series will advance against world champion Boris Spassky of Moscow for world supremacy.
A dispute over the site of the Fischer-Petrosian match threatened to split the World Chess Federation which has been unable to agree on a site but finally holding its annual congress in Vancouver for the past two weeks.
The Soviet and U.S. federations were unable to agree on a site but finally agreed to draw lots. The Americans won.
The U.S. federation also was successful in having the world federation change some crucial points in the system of play in the world championship. Draws will no longer count in the challengers' series, a point that Bobby Fischer has been arguing for years.
The three-year cycle for choosing an eventual challenger for the world champion remains unchanged, world federation president Dr. Max Euwe of Holland said. But modifications in the system will allow automatic seeding in interzonal competition for some of the top players in the world.
Dr. Euwe said the new system, worked out during the Vancouver congress, will allow for automatic seeding of eight of the world's best grandmasters.
Also seeded will be the six defeated candidates from the challengers' series, the loser of the world champion final and the reigning world junior champion.
With draws not counting in the challengers' series, the quarter-finals will be won by the first player to win three games, the semi-finals by four wins, the finals by five wins and the world championship by six wins. No maximums have been set on the number of games in each series.
The 1973 interzonal finals, which will decide the challengers for the 1975 world championship, will be split in to two tournaments and a committee is being formed to make certain that each will be of equal strength.
Dr. Euwe also announced that Guatemala became the 77th member-nation of the world federation which represents more than six million chess players around the globe.
