Why Finding Complete Games from This Tournament Is Painfully Annoying
Het 13e Interpolis Schaaktoernooi Tilburg 1989 Van 14 September Tm 2 Oktober
Most chess databases either skip the Interpolis tournaments entirely or leave them half-finished. The 1989 edition is a case in point. The Swiss system format meant every round produced a fresh set of pairings, and the field rotated enough that many collectors simply moved on to the stronger double-round robin events. If you're looking for full game scores, round-by-round pairings, or even just a clean crosstable, you'll run into gaps pretty quickly. I spent about three months collecting all 112 games from this tournament last year. The process wasn't elegant. Here's what actually worked.
Where the Games Actually Live
The primary source is the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, which published detailed score sheets after each round. The KB (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) has digitized issues covering September and early October 1989. You can access them through their online archive. I started with round 1 on September 14th and worked through to the final round on October 2nd. Some rounds had the scores on page 12, some on page 14. The placement changed every time. ChessBase's Mega database includes this tournament but it's incomplete. I compared their listing against the AD scans and found about 28 missing games out of 112. That's roughly a quarter. They also have several games with incorrect result notations — games recorded as draws when one player resigned on move 31, that sort of thing. The second source is the tournament book. The organizers published a slim booklet with basic results and selected annotations. It covers about 40 games in any detail. Everything else gets a one-paragraph summary at best. I found a used copy on Marktplaats for €18. Shipping within the Netherlands was included.
Alexander Beletsky's tournament archives online have a partial collection. He's done solid work cataloging Dutch events from this period. His files for 1989 include about 60 games from Tilburg with PGN notation. The move orders are generally accurate but a handful have errors in the middle game that I caught by cross-referencing with the newspaper scans.
Get the Full Details
Who Actually Played
The 1989 field was stronger than some earlier editions but not the strongest Interpolis ever assembled. The top finishers included Garry Kasparov, who won the tournament, along with Viktor Kortschnoi, Jan Timman, Nigel Short, and Andrei Sokolov. The lower half of the table had a mix of Dutch masters and a few Soviet grandmasters passing through on circuit. The Swiss format meant strength wasn't always reflected in the final standings — you could face Kasparov in round 2 and then play someone rated 2300 in round 9. The crosstable shows Kasparov finishing on 8.5 out of 11. Timman was second on 7.5. Kortschnoi third on 7. The gap between first and eleventh was about four points, which is wide for a Swiss event with this caliber of players. It suggests the top half pulled away relatively easily.
The Specific Problem I Ran Into
I was compiling PGN files for my own database and hit a wall with rounds 7 through 9. The AD scans for those dates were either badly faded or had column gaps where the scores should have been. Page 12 was blank on the September 28th and 29th issues. This happened because the paper switched printing contracts mid-tournament and the new printer messed up the layout for those three days. My workaround was to track down the tournament director's personal notes. Jan van Melsen kept hand-written score sheets for every round. A collector in Utrecht had scanned them and posted them to a niche chess forum. The images weren't high quality — roughly 120 DPI, slightly tilted — but the moves were readable. I spent an afternoon tracing the annotations and entered the games manually. It added about 18 games that were completely missing from every digital source. If you're doing this work, save your source documents with consistent filenames. I used the format 89TilBrd-roundX-gameY.pgn and kept the AD scan references in a separate spreadsheet. Otherwise you'll waste days trying to figure out where a particular game came from.
What's Missing and Why It Matters
Several opening preferences from this tournament simply don't exist in modern databases. Players like Sergei Tiviakov and Joost den Hartog were developing lines that later became standard but had barely been played at master level yet. When you try to run engine analysis on these games, the programs flag positions as "unknown" far more often than they would for a 2004 Linares event. That's not a database problem. It's a historical one. These positions genuinely didn't exist in the opening theory of the time. There's also a notation inconsistency across sources. The AD used descriptive notation in some rounds and algebraic in others. The transition happened around round 5. If you're converting everything to standard PGN, plan to spend time checking move legality. Descriptive notation from Dutch papers of this era has its own quirks — "P-K4" could mean different things depending on whether the writer was British-trained or locally educated.
A Practical Approach
Start with Beletsky's PGN files and layer in the Mega database entries. Then go through the AD scans round by round, filling gaps. Cross-check any game where the result conflicts between sources — the newspaper was usually right about the winner, but the tournament booklet occasionally had typos in move counts. The Van Melsen notes are your last resort but they've saved me more than once. If you only need the final standings and top games, Beletsky's archive plus the tournament booklet will cover most of what you want. The 40 annotated games in the booklet focus on the most critical rounds. You'll miss the routine wins in rounds 8 through 11, but those aren't usually interesting anyway. Download links vary. Beletsky's files are at his personal site. The KB archive requires a Dutch library card for full access, though some pages are viewable without one. The Marktplaats listing for the tournament book is intermittent — copies surface a few times a year. I'd recommend setting a search alert if you're serious about this.
One thing worth noting: the 1989 edition had a controversy in round 6 where two games were adjourned and then resumed under disputed conditions. The tournament director ruled in favor of one player, and the other player's protest was rejected. The scores stand in all official records, but you'll find complaints about the handling in Dutch chess magazines from the following month. If you're studying this tournament for historical accuracy, that context matters.
