He came so tantalizingly close to being world champion. Besides the two World Championship matches with Karpov, one of which he lost by a single game, the 1974 Candidates final also decided the championship following Fischer's abdication.
Given the soviet chess machine stacked the deck against him his whole life the chances are on a level playing field he'd have been a good world champion.
They tried it with Fisher but his genius was such that he smashed through the barricades and won anyway with as close to a perfect performance as a human has ever achieved.
Genius sure; but I think Fischer just could not be needled by Soviet/KGB sheenanigans - there was just no personal connection; and being American the possibility of assassination was out of the question. Korchnoi from the time of his defection onwards suffered from this fear.
He is the reason I took up playing Caro-Kann again, and the primary inspiration for my feeling that it's much more fun to play as Black -- a feeling that got me back into chess after years away.
Korchnoi played the Caro-Kann often enough in his career to be worthy of inspiration, including at least one WC match I can think of. He even has a main line variation named after him: 5...exf6
He inspired me too after studying some of his games and reading about him and his philosophy to the game, playing as Black did become more fun as well.
Korch was within one game in a long match of winning the world championship two different times in his forties. The champ was a young twentysomething Karpov.
Then he went on to be the best fiftysomething chess player ever to play the game in his fifties. And the best sixtysomething in his sixties. And the best seventy-something in his seventies.
He had a stroke right around age eighty but managed to slip in at least one win against American grandmaster and world championship candidate Fabiano Caruana in 2011 after he turned eighty, so he was the best ever of that decade as well.
Chess players usually peak a bit before thirty. Korchnoi defected after forty. As a dissident under the Soviet system, Korchnoi didn't have the chance to prove himself in international competition in his twenties or thirties, but he may have been the best in the world for a long time before Karpov or Fischer reached the championship.
It would be interesting to see a comparison of Korchnoi vs
Samuel Reshevsky as Reshevsky was quite strong as senior GM:
"... He won his last American championship in 1971 at the age of 59. In 1981, at 69, he was a finalist among Americans seeking to qualify for the world championship matches. And in 1984, at 72, he tied for first place in the Reykjavik International Tournament, his last world-class showing..."
There's a story of how how when Reshevsky was quite old he went to watch
a strong tournament in Europe and someone dropped out, and they asked
him to be a last minute substitute ("house player"?) and didn't he surprise
everyone by winning it?
But Korchnoi RIP, such great fighting spirit and interesting games.
"In 1981, at the age of 70, he tied for 3rd place in the U.S. Championship. In 1984, at the age of 72, he took first place in the powerful Reykjavik Open, which featured many grandmasters"
Capablanca likely could have if he hadn't died relatively young (age 53). He had been staging a serious middle-age return to high-level play at the time and was an extraordinarily gifted player: when Arpad Elo developed the rating system, he compiled ratings for past players and ended up assigning Capablanca what was at the time the highest rating of any player in history.
Meanwhile Garry Kasparov is now the same age Capablanca was at his death, and continues to play at a very high level; he still holds a FIDE rating of 2812, down from his peak of 2851 and historically second only to Magnus Carlsen's peak of 2882, and in April finished third in a blitz tournament where he put up a 2-1-3 record against eventual champion and GM Hikaru Nakamura.
Sure. Keep in mind that the top GMs have ratings of 2700 and above, while some GMs have ratings as low as the 2400s. So a top-level GM still has a large amount of age-related distance to fall before he won't be a match for a "low-level GM".
I read a study the other day that concluded that neuron regeneration can occur well past middle age. I think that's the only explanation for what happened here. He was easily the toughest senior citizen player that has ever lived.
Depending on what you mean by regeneration (renewing vs replacement), it's not clear it's a good thing. There is some indication that neurogenesis in the hippocampus is a cause of memory loss.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 71.9 ms ] threadhttps://www.chess.com/news/viktor-korchnoi-1931-2016-1214
http://en.chessbase.com/post/viktor-korchnoi-dies-at-85
They tried it with Fisher but his genius was such that he smashed through the barricades and won anyway with as close to a perfect performance as a human has ever achieved.
Then he went on to be the best fiftysomething chess player ever to play the game in his fifties. And the best sixtysomething in his sixties. And the best seventy-something in his seventies.
He had a stroke right around age eighty but managed to slip in at least one win against American grandmaster and world championship candidate Fabiano Caruana in 2011 after he turned eighty, so he was the best ever of that decade as well.
Chess players usually peak a bit before thirty. Korchnoi defected after forty. As a dissident under the Soviet system, Korchnoi didn't have the chance to prove himself in international competition in his twenties or thirties, but he may have been the best in the world for a long time before Karpov or Fischer reached the championship.
"... He won his last American championship in 1971 at the age of 59. In 1981, at 69, he was a finalist among Americans seeking to qualify for the world championship matches. And in 1984, at 72, he tied for first place in the Reykjavik International Tournament, his last world-class showing..."
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/07/nyregion/samuel-reshevsky-...
There's a story of how how when Reshevsky was quite old he went to watch a strong tournament in Europe and someone dropped out, and they asked him to be a last minute substitute ("house player"?) and didn't he surprise everyone by winning it?
But Korchnoi RIP, such great fighting spirit and interesting games.
"In 1981, at the age of 70, he tied for 3rd place in the U.S. Championship. In 1984, at the age of 72, he took first place in the powerful Reykjavik Open, which featured many grandmasters"
http://www.chessgames.com/player/samuel_reshevsky.html
Meanwhile Garry Kasparov is now the same age Capablanca was at his death, and continues to play at a very high level; he still holds a FIDE rating of 2812, down from his peak of 2851 and historically second only to Magnus Carlsen's peak of 2882, and in April finished third in a blitz tournament where he put up a 2-1-3 record against eventual champion and GM Hikaru Nakamura.
I don't think he was a dissident in his twenties or thirties, and he did play in international tournaments.
https://youtu.be/1n6yLPNj_Pk "The Legend: Victor Korchnoi - Ben Finegold"
If you've never seen Ben Finegold lecture from the St Louis Chess Club, he's hilarious (relative to the subject matter).