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Thursday, October 31, 2019

The Great Yerhoff - Ulvestad Fracas of 1946

Yerhoff in 1941
     If you are an old postalite (as Al Horowitz used to call correspondence players) like me, you probably remember seeing the name Frank J. Yerhoff in magazines like Chess Review and the Chess Correspondent. 
     Yerhoff (May 8, 1918 – April 27, 1999, 80 years old) was born in Regina, Saskatchewan and over the board he was one of Canada's strongest players during the late 1930s and 1940s. 
     He learned to play chess in 1935 and it wasn’t long before he was good enough to win both the Saskatchewan and correspondence chess championships...titles which he held for many years. He was a devoted Morphy fan and also dabbled at composing problems. 
     Yerhoff finished second in his first OTB tournament, the 1937 Sasketchewan Championship, but then won the tournament for the next eight years in a row and was joint Canadian Champion with D.A. Yanofsky in 1945. He was also Canadian Correspondence Chess Association champion in 1938 and the Canadian Correspondence Champion in 1939, 1940, 1941, 1943 and 1945.
     During the war years his efforts were confined mostly to correspondence play and starting in 1942 he began playing in Chess Review tournaments where he also had considerable success. Unfortunately not long after he started playing in Chess Review tournaments censorship regulations forced Chess Review to Canadian entries. 
     The US Open returned at the end of World War II and the 1946 tournament set a record with 58 players and it was the first Open run under the Swiss System. The first two rounds were paired by lot to determine qualifiers for the various final sections. The Preliminary tournament was played as an eight-round Swiss. Afterwards, the players were divided into groups of 8-10 by order of finish, with ties broken by Sonnenborg-Berger. Each finals group then played a round robin, with scores from the preliminary section carried over. 

Winners of the preliminary group were: 
1) Olaf Ulvestad 6.5 
2-4) Herman Steiner, Abraham Kupchik and Gerald Katz 6.0 
5-10) Donald Byrne, Walter Shipman, Harry Fajans, Herbert Seidman, Arthur Bisguier and Frank Yerhoff. 

     Weaver Adams, Miguel Aleman Dovo, Robert Byrne and Hyman Gordon equaled the scores of the players in the 5th-10th group, but failed to qualify for the Championship group because their S-B points were too low. 
     The final standing were: 

Scores include both finals and preliminaries 
1) Herman Steiner 13.5 
2) Herbert Seidman 2.5 
3) Abraham Kupchik 12.0 
4-5) Donald Byrne and Olaf Ulvestad 10.5 
6) Arthur Bisguier 9.5 
7-10) Harry Fajans, Gerald Katz, Walter Shipman and Frank Yerhoff 8.5 

    In the following game Yerhoff defeats Olaf Ulvestad in a real free-for-all. 

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