Fischer – 1980 U.S. Championship?
During my research on various historical chess facts, I frequently come across items of unexpected interest and curiosity. Here is an article from the Indiana (USA) Evening Gazette in 1980, concerning Bobby Fischer that completely baffled me.
If anyone has any further information on this, please post here or e-mail me at admin@rookhouse.com:
Chess Tourney Brings Top Talent
GREENVILLE, Pa. (AP) — Bobby Fischer will be among 14 elite players who will compete in the U.S. Chess Championship that begins Thursday at Thiel College in this Mercer County community. Fischer, the former World Chess Champion from Brooklyn, has won the title a record eight times. He logged an 11-0 sweep in the 1963-64 tournament. The U.S. Chess Federation calls the participants “the cream of American chess and some of the finest players in the world”.
The federation, along with the American Chess Foundation, are sponsoring the tournament. The 14 players from around the nation include nine grandmasters, four international masters, and a top national master. The tournament includes current and World Junior Champion Yasser Seirawan and former World Junior Champion Mark Diesen. Most of the other players have distinguished themselves in top chess events around the world. Most of the players were selected on the basis of their highest published federation rating since the last U.S. championship was held in June, 1978, in Pasadena, California.
National Master Joseph Bradford was seeded as the 1978 U.S. Open Champion; had Grandmaster Arthur Bisguier and International Master Sierawan not qualified on the basis of their ratings, they would have been seeded as the 1979 Grand Prix Champion and the 1979 U.S. Junior Champion respectively. Three of the players originally invited were unable to play. They were replaced by Grandmaster Pal Benko, International Master John Peters and Grandmaster Larry Evans.
Other participants include International Grandmaster Anatoly Lein, who emigrated to the United States from Russia in 1976 and International Grandmaster Robert Byrne. The defending champion is Lubomir Kavalek, who won the title at the 1978 championship in Pasadena. He will not attend the tournament. The championship will begin with the first round Thursday afternoon and continue through June 28. A closing luncheon and awards ceremony will be held June 29. The tournament was brought to Greenville through the help of Thiel music professor Ivan Ramanenko, a chess Master acquainted with a number of the participants.
The winner of this year’s tournament will join an elite group of players that includes Paul Morphy, Jackson Showalter, Harry Nelson Pillsbury, Frank Marshall, and Samuel Reshevsky. The U.S. Chess Federation, headquartered in New Windsor, N.Y., claims 50,000 members.
SOURCE: Indiana Evening Gazette – June 11, 1980
Kevin,
Thanks for the Link of your coverage of the London 1851 event. I have become enamored with this event as it makes for a good subject to study. I’ve doing an in depth narrative covering this event on my main blog at http://blunderprone.blogspot.com where i reference the games I posted on the chess.com server. I am using this event as an exercise to self annotate master games. It leaves room for improvement But I firmly believe in the importance of the struggle for the learnign process.
I am wrapping up the first round this week. I will do more in depth coverage of the other rounds. Even though i covered Staunton versus Anderssen on my main blog already when I was using the book, GM-RAM as a tool, I decided to dive deeper into this first major International event.
I think the next Tournament I plan to study in depth will be Hastings 1895.
George Duval — May 2, 2008 @ 8:25 amHastings 1895 sounds like a good choice. There were so many great tournaments in the mid to late 1800’s.
Here is a list of my personal favorites from that era:
1857 – New York
1882 – Vienna
1883 – London
1893 – New York
1895 – St. Petersburg
1896 – Nuremburg
1897 – Berlin
1898 – Vienna
1899 – London
If you ever need me to dig up information on any of these, please let me know. Thanks.
Rook House — May 2, 2008 @ 9:03 amSounds great, Thanks Kevin.
Please feel free to check out my other blog.
George Duval — May 2, 2008 @ 11:55 amThe above 3 comments does not seem related to the Fischer article about the 1980 U.S. Championship. Any updates regarding this 1980 U.S. championship. I never heard about this and I wonder if anybody else has comments regarding it.
A. Abdallah — June 21, 2008 @ 4:55 pmThe 1980 US Championship was held at Thiel College (Greeneville, Pennsylvania), Larry Christiansen, Larry Evans, and Walter Browne tied that year.
It’s possible that Fischer was invited through one of his friends, as he often was, and it’s equally likely that he never answered or flat-refused. His paranoia was near a peak (in his mind, “the Russians” and “the Jews” existed soley to do him in), and he kept a low profile. I believe he was living in Southern California and Mexico during this time period. The USCF certainly never seriously entertained the idea of his competing.
My guess is that the newspaper was the victim of a joke.
Tom Barrister — June 23, 2008 @ 12:59 amIt could well have been a joke but if so someone must have been putting the Associated Press on as well as the Evening Gazette, unless some stringer at the AP decided to indulge in some obscure chess humor??
Hypatia — June 30, 2008 @ 7:45 pmI apologize for the first few comments being off-topic, but I am leaving them intact out of my respect for Mr. Duval.
I have spoken to many Fischer aficionados over the last two months and nobody has anything concrete in regard to the validity of the facts behind this article.
I suppose we may never know the true story behind this.
Rook House — June 30, 2008 @ 9:05 pm