Dear chess friends of the older generation,
Let me ask you the following question: WHICH TIE-BREAK CRITERIA WERE USED AT THE GMA OPEN TOURNAMENTS IN 1988-90?
The question is on behalf of the well-known chess historian and statistician, the developer of the olimpbase.org website, Wojciech Bartelski . The reason of my involvement is that I have more friends among chess players :-).
That knowledge is essencial for generating appropriate tournament tables. All attempts to guess that by applying various versions of Buchholz, progressive score, ARO etc. fail to bring the results known from available chess sources like the Russian Encyclopaedian Dictionary "Chess" (1990) etc.
Example: here is the table of the Moscow tournament: http://www.olimpbase.org/ind-wcc/wcupgma-1989qb.html (sorted by Buchholz) . But the real official order of players who shared places 2-7 is unclear. The above-mentioned Dictionary quotes the following order: Akopian, Vladimirov, de Firmian, Gavrikov, Khalifman, Timoshenko. However, no known tie-break score brings such a result.
I understand that it would be a wonder if someone remembered such a small detail after 30 years. But still let's hope for that wonder :-).
