SAN ANTONIO Tournament 1972

Church’s Fried Chicken After Santa Monica in 1968, another first-class contest was held in San Antonio, California 1972, sponsored by Church’s Fried Chicken, Inc. This tournament should be considered as the tournament with a fine list of participants and one of the main events of the year. A great and interesting company of players took part in this tournament: Ex-World Champion Petrosian, possible aspirants for the title Bent Larsen, Lajos Portisch, Svetozar Gligoric and Vlastimil Hort, promising young talents Anatoly Karpov, Julio Kaplan and Henrique Mecking. As a rule, any strong tournament will produce some surprising results, and San Antonio was no exception. The success of such players as Tigran Petrosian and Lajos Portisch and the high place taken by Karpov did not surprise anyone. The greatest surprise of the tournament was the performance of one of the world’s leading Grandmasters, Bent Larsen. He played unrealistically optimistically, sometimes he overestimated his position and his possibilities, for which he had to pay. The high results of Suttles were also surprising. Under the known leadership of Harry Golombek and George Koltanowski, the atmosphere of the tournament was rather friendly. The San Antonio Tournament was a very strong, well-organised event of the American chess world.