Unveiling the Victory : How Spassky Won The Third World Junior Chess Championship Antwerp 1995 – Serruys

Unveiling the Victory – How Spassky Won The Third World Junior Chess Championship Antwerp 1995 – Henri Serruys

In this book, the Belgian chess historian Henri Serruys traces back how Spassky became the first Soviet World Junior Chess Champion in Antwerp 1955. Endowed with recently discovered original material from the tournament organizer, the Belgian youth chess leader Hendrik Baelen, he paints a very colorful picture of this sparkling event. How to finance the event from private donors? Where to accommodate the players (and their seconds, mostly from Eastern European countries)? Would the favorites come through the preliminary rounds? Moreover, Serruys digs into contemporary sources and contacted all the participants, in so far as they are still alive. By combining these three main sources (papers from Baelen, contemporary journals and testimony of participants), Henri creates an authentic account of this milestone for both FIDE and the development of international youth chess. Moreover, he presents the key games of the tournament and unearthed a couple of hitherto unknown games of Spassky. Finally, he pays a well-deserved tribute to Hendrik Baelen and thus puts him on the map of chess history! The original research conducted for this book contributes greatly to the history of FIDE and Belgian chess alike. Let us lift the Curtain for Spassky at the age of 18 years!

A relatively blind spot of chess history relates to the World Junior Chess Championships. Conceived 1951 in Birmingham, the competition between players, who are not yet 20 years old, gradually established itself as an important part of of the World Chess Federation (FIDE) calendar.  The first world class player to win the tournament was Boris Spassky in 1955. In the same year he already qualified at the Interzonal Tournament in Gothenburg for the Candidates Tournament in 1956. He went on to become world champion in 1969, but famously lost his title to Bobby Fischer in 1972 in the match of the century in Reykjavík. In this book, the Belgian chess historian Henri Serruys traces back how Spassky became the first Soviet World Junior Chess Champion in Antwerp 1955.
Author’s comment

The eldest of Hendrik Baelen’s grandsons, Robert (Rob) Baelen and the author of this book are friends and members of a same chess club. Rob, after selling and emptying his parents’ house in Edegem near Antwerp, found a photo album and a godforsaken red-cover map.  It turned out that this map contained his grandfather’s notes about the organization of the 1955 Junior World Championship in Antwerp, while the photo album contained many photos of this tournament, among other things. When Rob showed me the map and photo album, I resolved to write a book on this Junior World Championship based on such a wealth of unknown data.

I am extremely grateful to Rob for allowing me to use this information fully and without time limitations. Initially, the corona pandemic prevented me from consulting in libraries another important source of information, namely the newspapers and magazines of that time. As my research progressed, it became more and more clear to me what an enormous role Mr. Hendrik Baelen – in addition to the organization of this World Championship – has played in the development of youth chess in Belgium. That is why this book, in addition to a rather atypical tournament book, also aspires to be a posthumous tribute to this tireless organizer, the kind of people who often remain under the radar screen in every sport.