1976 Arandjelovac Zonal Revisited

My index of zonal pages, The World Chess Championship : Zonals, follows a straightforward structure. Players in a zone assemble for a tournament, they play each other, and the winners qualify into an Interzonal. Repeat that sequence for as many zones as were authorized for a particular cycle.

Sometimes the evolution of a zonal is not so straightforward. One example is documented on my page (C05) 1960-1963 Zonal Cycle, where the zone two tournament at Berg en Dal was annulled and played again the following year at Marianske Lazne. The underlying reason had to do with Cold War Chess Politics (July 2015).

Another such cold war event involved two zonals, 1975 Barcelona & 1976 Arandjelovac (August 2014). I outlined the circumstances in that blog post, but there's more to the story. Vladica Andrejic of Perpetualcheck.com, sent me scans of the following clippings, which tell the tale of 1976 Arandjelovac.

Šahovski glasnik, 1976-09, p.305-306

I ran the scans through (1) an OCR to text converter, followed by (2) a language translator, and was pleased enough with the results that I'll incorporate them here. The article, written by V. Sokolov, is titled 'Supplementary Zone Tournament in Arandelovac'. The first two paragraphs [with some minor edits by me] say,

It is in Arandelovac at the time of 16. to 25. [April] o. g. held supplementary match-tournament of four grandmasters who for obvious reasons did not participate in the zonal tournament in Barcelona (Spain).

After many vicissitudes and months of negotiations on the route FIDE-SSJ ['ŠSJ' = 'Šahovski Savez Jugoslavije' = Yugoslavian Chess Federation] finally four grandmasters Uhlmann (DDR), Smejkal (CSSR), Adorjan (Hungary) and Velimirovic (Yugoslavia) got a chance to [be] subsequently included in interzone tournaments. It needed to be won the first two places, i.e. the last two are dropped.

The next eight paragraphs describe the evolution of the tournament, especially taken from the point of view of Velimirovic. Unfortunately for his Yugoslav fans, he had a poor tournament and finished last behind the other three players who finished tied for 1st-3rd. The next paragraph says,

So the tournament ended in a dead race. Three players found themselves in the first place and should have continued with a new two-round tournament. They have, however, opted for gambling, just like Parma and Liberzon. Such as it is known that the dice were not in favor of Adorjan, [so] Smejkal and Uhlmann were placed for interzone tournaments. It seems that it should not be applied gambling when it comes to such a serious matter as the World [Championship]. Yet it is in a sense chess degradation.

I added the crosstable shown in the clipping to the page (C10) 1975-1978 Zonal Cycle, then reorganized the page to clarify the different sequences of events. There are still some open questions involving the 'IZ Qualifiers', but perhaps 'Šahovski glasnik' will prove useful there as well.