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Tuesday, March 12, 2019

When Amateur Brilliancies Were Possible

     Back in the old days when the USCF had under way 10,000 members, there were less than 50 masters in the whole country and nobody ever dreamed there would be anything like chess engines that made millions of players armchair Grandmasters, a few of us living out in the vast American wilderness played postal chess. The USCF didn’t dabble in that form of the game; it was the domain of the Correspondence Chess League of America and Al Horowitz’ Chess Review, the Postal Chess Magazine. 
     There were books and pamphlets on openings, but almost everybody referred to Modern Chess Openings. Even Chess Life told you the page and column number of the opening when they published a game. 

     Over the board tournaments were scarce. For example, the May 1955 issue of Chess Life listed the following tournaments.  It should be mentioned that in 1955 a dollar was worth about 9-1/2 of them today! 

Hoboken, New Jersey. Entry fee $1.00. Prizes: Medal and other valuable prizes.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Entry fee $3.00. Cash and book prizes depending on entries. 
Spokane, Washington. Entry fee $3.00. First prize $25. 
Baltimore, Maryland. Entry fee $3.00 plus $3.00 deposit to be returned upon completion of all games. No prizes announced. 
Beloit, Wisconsin. Entry fee $4.00. No prizes mentioned. 
St. Paul, Minnesota. Entry fee $2.50. Trophy and cash. 
Hutchinson, Kansas. Write TD for details. 
Logansport, Indiana. $3.00 or $5.00 to be determined at players meeting. First place gets half the money. 
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Entry fee $10.00 with $5.00 refunded upon completion of all games. First prize of $150.00. 
Phoenix, Arizona. Entry fee $5.00. No prizes announced. 
Dallas, Texas. Entry fee $10.00. First prize $75.00. 
Chicago, Illinois. Write for entry fee and details. $175.00 first prize. 
Davenport, Iowa. Entry fee $7.00. $100.00 first prize. 

     So, for many players postal play was a way to play some serious chess. In fact, Chess Review had a few over the board masters playing and three or four times I played opponents who had actually participated in some of the old U.S. Championships. Naturally I lost, but I got to play them. 
     The great thing about postal chess was that sometimes an unheralded amateur could pull off a real brilliancy. I, myself, pulled off a few of them...at least I thought so until chess engines made their appearance. 
     I especially recall one brilliant game involving a sacrifice on my part that topped my list of brilliancies. Playing over it with an early engine revealed that my move that merited two exclamation marks actually allowed my opponent a mate in one, but he didn’t see it! 

     In the following game Dr. Maxwell Sturm plays some inspired chess. Sturm was a British consul who lived in Trinidad. His opponent was Lee T. Magee (April 11, 1928 – April 20, 2015, 87 years old) who was Nebraska State Champion in 1950, 1951, 1953 and 1955 and Omaha city champion in 1947, 1953, 1955 and 1956. On the 1955 USCF rating list he was rated 2160. While that rating might not seem very impressive today, at the time were were only 41 players in the country that had a Master rating which was then over 2300. A rating of 2100 - 2299 was classified as Expert. 
  The game was played in a Gambit Tournament. I played in a few and they were great fun. Sections were made up of 7 players with two games against each opponent. Players were supplied with the opening moves to 20 or so gambits and white got to choose which one was played in each game. It’s unfortunate that engines have killed off playing chess this way and deprived amateurs of a moment of, if not glory, a great deal of personal satisfaction. 

     Of course even in those days most “real” players (i.e. OTB players) didn’t think much of postal chess. In one, for me, eye opening incident was when I had a game published in Chess Review and annotated by the legendary John W. Collins. Only one person out of about 20 at the chess club in the big city of Toledo, Ohio saw it. All he said was, “Saw your game.” 
     In one incident a TD announced free entry to titled players, so when a titled correspondence player showed up the TD refused him the free entry...correspondence titles didn’t count. In a way the TD was right because they are two different animals. If a titled OTB player wanted to play in a postal tournament they would have had to start at Class A (1800) and work their way up, so I guess it was fair. 

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