During my school years in the Elbrus region (Europe’s highest mountain, Mount Elbrus, was visible from the window of our apartment in Cherkessk, and I was just as happy as a Japanese person who sees Mount Fuji from his window), I played only one serious tournament. It took place in the town of Georgievsk in the Stavropol region in April 1977, when I was 15 years old—almost exactly half a century ago.
At that time, the Karachay–Cherkess Republic was part of the Stavropol krai, and I played in its men’s championship. It was a unique tournament in many respects. First, it had 64 participants. Second, it was the first adult tournament for an eight-year-old first-category player, Aleksey Dreev, whom everyone thought was seven (no one knew that his birthday coincided with Spassky’s), and people were shocked by this. Third, the tournament was won outright by Master Vladimir Saigin. In 1954, Saigin had lost a 14-game match to Mikhail Tal by the score 6–8—and Tal also earned the master title as a result. In Soviet times, to become a Master one had to avoid losing a 14-game match against a designated Master. Saigin himself had done this back in 1943, drawing 7–7 with Vasily Panov (remember the Panov Attack in the Caro–Kann?), and thus became a Master.
Fourth, the tournament featured Master Anatoly Gimadeev, a multiple Olympiad champion with the USSR team of blind chess players. His magical way of touching the pieces with musical fingers and feeling the holes in the center of the squares on a special chessboard always attracted spectators. In one of the games, he faced a friend of mine (there were three of us 15-year-old first-category players from Cherkessk). My friend quickly got into a bad position and then made an impossible move, exploiting his opponent’s blindness. This inevitably led to a scandal and disgrace.
And fifth—I was playing in this tournament as well.
I remember only two of my games. One was in the middle of the tournament against Saigin, and the other was in the final round against a strong Candidate Master. We both had 5 points out of 8, and a win would take one of us to 6th place, which qualified for the preliminary stage of the USSR Championship. I played Black in both games.
Saigin, who was 59 at the time, looked at least 75 and constantly supported his completely white head with one hand. So, “in the spirit of Tal” (I knew about their match), I sacrificed a piece on move 16—and resigned already on move 21.
In the final round, I played against the tournament’s biggest headache. Throughout the game, he would stare straight into your eyes, and if you tried to shield yourself with your hand, he would lean over the board—and practically over you—to penetrate any available gaps with his scorching gaze. I was absolutely terrified on the eve of this game, anticipating a shameful defeat.
And then I decided to “save humanity.” I taped over my glasses with two paper ovals, each with a tiny hole punched in it. My eyes were invisible, but I could see everything perfectly! Don’t try this experiment—the result looks utterly idiotic. At the time, however, I didn’t know that, because where we were staying, there was no mirror. I hid my plan from my friends and my coach by keeping the glasses in my pocket.
The brilliant plan worked. Deprived of his usual source of inspiration, my opponent offered no resistance at all, and the game reached the following ending. Moreover, White was in severe time trouble:
Here I saw a plan: advance the pawn to h2, protect it with the king, place the bishop on the a7–g1 diagonal, and deliver mate with the rook on g1. Yes—this is how imaginative I was at 15!
And yet, we had been told by our coach (a Candidate Master) at one of the three training sessions we attended over six years at the Pioneer Palace chess ring that R+B vs. R is a dead draw…
When I finally advanced the pawn to h2, I realized with horror that everything was stalemate, and there was no win! Nalimov tablebases say that a win does exist—you must force White to capture the pawn at the “right” moment to win the R+B vs. R ending. But as you already know, I could not give up the pawn!
My opponent’s time trouble remained my only hope. I deliberately ran my own clock down to five minutes so I could stop recording the moves and so that my opponent would not think on my time. Then I began to maneuver my rook aimlessly.
This was the last game of the tournament, and a crowd gathered around us. No one laughed at me or criticized my glasses—everyone understood why I had done it.
In the end, I simply placed my rook on g2 en prise. My opponent panicked, captured it—and at that very moment his flag finally fell!
A win would have given me a shared 5th–6th place with Master Gimadeev and the coveted qualification for the USSR Championship. A draw meant shared 6th–7th place with Master Vyacheslav Koltsov and a worse Buchholz tiebreak. A funny coincidence: a month earlier I had returned from the All-Russian Physics Olympiad, where I finished 7th, while only the top 6 qualified for the All-Union Olympiad. So I experienced the existential absurdity of “six–seven” already half a century ago!
My coach did not fight for me—he said we had a bus leaving in an hour. Worse still, in that tournament I had achieved my first Candidate Master norm, and he did not even submit it!
I was devastated. When I got home, I immediately set up the position on the board and found a simple win “by hand.” The king must hide in the cozy corner on h3, and from there the mate is trivial in just a few moves:
Why am I telling you all this?
Ah yes! Because the 239-move game Danin–Azarov from the Czech Team Championship Extraliga 2016 made me do so! After move 139 Black should be mated in 3-4 moves, but two very strong grandmasters (both around 2600) played on for exactly another 100 moves! The time control was 90/40 + 30, with the 30-second increment from move one. Calculations similar to those in Part 5 of my article show that each player had about 12–13 minutes left on the clock.
But that is not even the main point. White could not possibly have failed to know—or understand—that the endgame was easily winning; otherwise it would belong among the most fantastical endgames in chess history, far more fantastic than “bishop and pawn versus bare king”!
Perhaps this explains why GM Danin (or GM Azarov) did not submit an application to the Guinness Book of Records. Otherwise, their game could have become the longest decisive game (by number of moves) in the history of chess.
And in that 1977 Stavropol krai's Championship, as far as I remember, the future World Championship challenger Aleksey Dreev (who played a match against Viswanathan Anand in 1991) scored 50% of points…
Valery Golubenko is a FIDE Trainer, Estonian Rapid Chess Champion (1993–1994), and a multiple-time Estonian team champion in classical chess, rapid and blitz, as a member of the Diagonaal club, with titles spanning four decades — from 1986 to 2026. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics and is even the author of his own definition of the imaginary unit in higher mathematics. But above all, Valery is the father of two daughters, Alexandra and Valentina, who lost their mother in 2012.
The sisters met in April 2017 in their childhood room in Kohtla-Järve—Valentina was briefly at home after the Women’s European Championship in Riga. On the wall were FIDE certificates: Valentina’s WGM, their mother Anastasia Golubenko’s WFM, and mine as a FIDE Trainer.
Valentina’s diplomas: World Champion G18 (2008), 10th place world's B10 (1999), 10th place world's G10 (2000). There is a photo of Boris Spassky in front of Mt. Elbrus, taken at the 2008 Women’s World Championship in Nalchik.
Every participant was given a painting of Mt. Elbrus! Could I — whose schoolboy childhood was spent in the shadow of that great mountain (photo above by Александр Маркин) — have imagined or dreamed that exactly 30 years after the Stavropol krai's Championship my daughter would qualify for the World Championship, and that it would take place right next to Elbrus?
Yes—exactly 30 years later, in April 2007 in Dresden, at the Women’s European Championship, Valentina, aged just 16, achieved the best result of her career: shared 5th place among 150 participants, completing her final two WGM norms, and her first two IM norms.
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