1976-1983
GM Torre shot to prominence in 1976 as a possible future title challenger after winning a strong four-man tournament in Manila ahead of world champion Anatoly Karpov – thus becoming the first player to finish ahead of Karpov in a tournament since the latter became world champion. The high-point of his career came in the early 1980s when he was ranked world No.17; successfully going on to qualify to be a candidate for the world championship after tying for first with Lajos Portisch during the 1982 Toluca Interzonal.
Torre has the distinction of being the first Asian player to earn the title of International Grandmaster. He qualified for the Candidates Matches for the 1984 World Championship. In that preliminary stage, the contenders play matches against each other to determine who will challenge the world champion. Torre was eliminated when he lost his match against Zoltán Ribli by a score of 6-4.
After losing his quarter-final candidates match to Zoltan Ribli in 1983, Torre became disillusioned with chess and more or less went into semi-retirement. He went on to become a minor celebrity due to his daily one hour TV programme “Chess Today”
From 1970 to 2006, the former business administration undergraduate from Mapúa Institute of Technology donned the national colors 19 consecutive times in the World Chess Olympiad, breaking the old record of 18 consecutive held by Heikki Westerinen although still a shy of the record 20 non-consecutive appearances made by Hungary's Lajos Portisch. He had manned the top board for Team Philippines for a record 17 times already except in the 1970 and 2006 editions. He also has taken part in six Asian Chess Team Championships (1977, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1986, 1993) and once in the World Student Chess Team Championships (1969). During that 36-year stretch, Torre played on Board 1 a total of 17 times, a world record. He played a lower boar only twice: in 1970 in Siegen, Germany and in 2006 in Turin, Italy.
In 1988, Torre captained the Philippine team to its best-ever seventh-place finish in the Chess Olympiad in Thessaloniki, Greece.
In 2010, He made his 20th Olympiad Appearance equaling the same appearance with Lajos Portisch. In the 16th Asian Games, Torre helped the Philippines finished with the second place behind China, beating the Indian Team. n 2006, Torre participated in the second San Marino International Chess Open where he tied for fourth through eleventh places with 6½ points in nine rounds where he eventually placed seventh after the tie-breaks becoming the highest-placed Filipino in the said tournament. He had a performance rating of 2612 at the said tournament and won €1,000 for his seventh-place finish.
Torre was a friend of Bobby Fischer. He worked on Fischer's team in his 1992 rematch with Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia. Much later, Torre conducted interviews on Filipino radio with Bobby Fischer. Those interviews gained notoriety for Fischer and despair for his fans. Torre was involved in 1996 when Fischer Random Chess was launched. One anecdote during this period has it that when Torre and Fischer boarded a taxi in Buenos Aires, the driver immediately recognized Torre as a chess player. As both were about to leave the taxi, the driver, not knowing who the other distinguished passenger was, asked Torre: “Whatever happened to that crazy guy Fischer?”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenio_Torre
