Happy 80th Birthday !! Victor Korchnoi

Victor Korchnoi was born in Leningrad in March 1931. He learned how to play chess at the age of seven and soon started playing in  "family tournaments."
At the age of 13, he entered the chess club at the Leningrad Palace of Young Pioneers , winning first category rating at the age of 15.  In 1947 he joined the U.S.S.R. Junior Championship and finished at the top of the table.
H competed against experienced masters for the first time in the 1950 Leningrad Championship ,scoring 4.5 out of five against masters to finished 2nd place.
His play is characterized by  striving for the initiative , tactical inventiveness and love for unusual , dizziying combinations. He boldly sought complexities and made more accurate and far sighted appraisals of entangled positions than his adversaries. In 1951 Korchnoi was one of the finalist in the All Russian Chigorin Memerial tournament participated by hundreds of thousands amateur. He qualified for the title of Master.
He first won the right to compete in a U.S.S.R. Championship in 1952, in this tournament he played against renowned grandmasters in equal footing and finished sixth place with 11 points out of 19.
Korchnoi then 24 captured first place in an international tournament in Bucharest,capital of Rumania with only one defeat; he won ten games and drew six,scoring 13 points.
In 1953 F.I.D.E. conferred the title of International Master to Korchnoi ,at about the same time he graduated from the Department of History at the Zhdanov University in Leningrad. In 1956 after winning new victories in tournaments and matches both in the U.S.S.R. and abroad, F.I.D.E. made him an Internationa Grandmaster.
ORIGINAL PLANS, A CONSTANT QUEST FOR THE NEW,GOOD COMBINATIONAL VISION, AND A HIGH LEVEL OF TECHNIQUES are the features of Korchnoi play.