1951 U.S. Championship

     It was quite a year. Besides the fact that I started elementary school, the Twenty-second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. It set a limit on the number of times an individual is eligible for election to President and set additional eligibility conditions for presidents who succeed to the unexpired terms of their predecessors. 
     In other news: Super glue was invented. Radio disc Jockey Alan Freed coined the term Rock N Roll. The first color TV pictures broadcast from Empire State Building in New York City. Speaking of television, MGM owed the dog who played Lassie $40,000 in back pay. In lieu of cash, they gave Lassie's trainer the rights to the name. In October the classic television show "I Love Lucy" debuted on the CBS. 
     Comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested for impersonating a priest when he stole priests' clothing by posing as a laundry man and then collected donations for a leper colony. 
     Joe DiMaggio retired at the end of the 1951 season. The first direct-dial coast to coast telephone call was made in November between the Mayor of Englewood, New Jersey and the Mayor of Alameda, California. It took about 18 seconds to connect the call using a direct distance dialing system. Dr. Carl Djerassi and a student successfully synthesized a key ingredient in the creation of the birth control pill. 
     The school board of Logan, Utah forced 7th graders to get tattoos of their blood type in case they were injured during a nuclear war.  The fact that the Russians were capable of launching a nuclear attack against the United States was a cause for concern where I lived even though we were 1,700 miles from Utah.  As school children we were shown training films and practiced diving under our desks and covering our heads in the event of a nuclear explosion. According to our teachers the Russians had a nearby (60 miles away) big city targeted so we had to be prepared. How they knew that I have no idea.
     In more serious news, the U.S. Navy committed the dastardly act of bursting balloons filled with serratia marcescens bacteria over San Francisco with the result that many people were hospitalized. Not to be outdone, the CIA was also engaged in their own experiments.  
     President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur as commander of the U.S. forces in Korea. MacArthur wanted to bomb Communist China into oblivion, but the President wanted only to halt the invasion. 
     In the U.S. the chess championship was in a mess. The championship had been held every two years since 1936 and even the war years hadn't interrupted it, but by 1951 the U.S.C.F. was having organizational problems as a result of their trying to fix what they believed to be a flaw in the championship. 
     They thought the 1948 championship proved something was wrong; the tournament was bigger, but the level of play wasn't up to par. Their “fix” was a three-year cycle of tournaments similar to the one that FIDE had just established to select the challenger for the world championship. 
     Remember, the rating system had just been put into effect, so many players didn't have one. Also, the system was based on results over the previous three years which meant many of the younger players were underrated. 
     The new plan was regional preliminaries were conducted in the first year's cycle. In the second year the regional qualifiers and seeded players met in a qualifying tournament and then in the third year the championship would be held. It sounded good, but for unknown reasons the U.S.C.F. failed to organize the qualifying tournament in 1950. 
     So, in an effort to salvage the train wreck, in 1951 they planned to hold an invitational with 50 players from across the country. The trouble was, it was too big and while many thought 24 players would be more manageable, there really wasn't much interest on the part of the players. Even the defending U.S. Champion, Herman Steiner, turned down his invitation. So did top players Arnold Denker, Reuben Fine and Isaac Kashdan. 
     Still, 24 players showed up and ground through an elimination tournament to select the top 12 for the finals. Some older players managed to qualify, some didn't: Alex Kevitz, who hadn't played in a championship since 1936 didn't make the cut; Milton Hanauer, who last played in the championship in 1940, made it through. The other old-timer was Albert Simonson, known a “Buddy” to his friends, also made the finals for the first time in 11 years. 
     Samuel Reshevsky was the clear favorite. After all, he had not lost a game in a championship tournament except the 1942 playoff match with Isaac Kashdan who had beaten him only twice in 11 games. Besides that, according to the new rating list Reshevsky far out-rated his rivals. Who was there that could challenge him? 
     It turned that 19-year old Larry Evans could. Evans had been the top scorer for the U.S. on the Olympic team the previous year in Dubrovnik and was ranked number 4 in the country behind Reshevsky, Fine and Horowitz. Evans' victory made him the youngest U.S. champion ever up to that time. 
     Herbert Seidman jumped out to an early lead with three straight wins, but he was upset in the fourth round by Evans, who adopted the then new Najdorf Sicilian and that was it for Seidman. Being the critic that he was, Anthony Santasiere complained when Evans played 6...e5, "I can never understand how they like P-K4 (i.e. e4 or ...e5) on the sixth move, but not on the first. But it is all the rage nowadays. In a certain sense chess is like measles." The dogmatic Santasiere was to get into a written feud with Evans years later when Evans showed disdain of Santasiere's hypocrisy for “talking like a tiger and playing like a Tigran (Petrosian).” But Evans did admit Santasiere had the heart of a Romantic even if he didn't have the games to back it up. 
     Evans held a slim lead up to the 7th round when Reshevsky's surprise defeat by Ariel Mengarini ultimately cost him a tie for first. I posted on Mengarini and that game HERE. 
     One interesting game that had no real effect on the standings was the Horowitz – Pavey game. 

     Pavey is winning easily and almost any reasonable move would win even if he missed the mate in 12 moves starting with 76...Kd6. Instead, Pavey, in attempting to simplify, played 76...Qxf3+ and after 77.Qxf3 Ra3 he wins back the Q and has an easy win. The fly in the ointment was that Horowitz played 78.Kh4!!. That meant that if Pavey didn't play 78...Rxf3 then white is left with a Q vs R ending which he can win without any great difficulty. So, he had no choice but to play 78...Rxf3 which is a stalemate. Batgirl has posted an excellent article on Max Pavey HERE. 
     Pavey died of radiation poisoning and it's interesting that in 1951 the maker of the famous Erector Set toy, Gilbert, was offering the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab as a toy lab set. 
     It contained a cloud chamber allowing kids to watch alpha particles traveling at 12,000 miles per second and a scope showing the results of radioactive disintegration on a fluorescent screen. And, it also contained an electroscope that measured the radioactivity of different radioactive substances that came with the set. 
     Gilbert claimed the set wasn't dangerous, but did warn users not take the ore samples out of their jars because they tended to flake and crumble and you would run the risk of having radioactive ore spread around the house. The set originally sold for $49.50, equivalent to $520 today. 
     The set was never popular and fewer than 5000 were sold. Gilbert thought the reason was because the lab was only appropriate for those who had more educational background than the kids they were aiming at. More likely, it was the whopping price tag. In those days, even if a parent had the equivalent of $500 they weren't going to spend it on a kid's toy. 

1) Larry Evans 9.5-1.5 
2) Samuel Reshevsky 8.5-2.5 
3) Dr. Max Pavey 7.0-4.0 
4) Herbert Seidman 6.5-4.5 
5) I.A. Horowitz 5.5-5.5 
6-7) Sidney Bernstein and Anthony Santasiere 5.0-6.0 
8) Dr. Ariel Mengarini 4.5-6.5 
9) George Shainswit 4.0-7.0 
10-12) Milton Hanauer, Albert Pinkus and Albert C. Simonson 3.5-7.5 

   Simonson was a chess hustler and coffeehouse player who played many thrilling, if imperfect, games. His rout of Albert Pinkus in this tournament was given in my post on him HERE.  
     The following game between old rivals Al Horowitz and Samuel Reshevsky is unusual because Reshevsky sacrifices his Q for three minor pieces on move 11 then gradually outplays his opponent. Today it's a well known book line.  Chess.com has a couple of articles on a Q vs. three minor pieces by WIM Iryna Zenyuk HERE and HERE.