The 1964 Open was played at the luxurious Plankinton House Hotel in Milwaukee and was a seven‐round Swiss in which 108 players, including one GM and 15 Masters, participated.
Miro Radojcic won the event on tiebreaks with a score of 6-1. His score was equaled by Robert Byrne of Indianapolis and by the Chicago Masters Albert Sandrin and Edward Formanek. Three other Chicago Masters tied at 5.5-1.5: Paul Tautvaisas, Vasa Kostic and Richard Verber. Edmar Mednis of New York topped a group scoring 5‐2 while former two time winner Curt Brasket of Minneapolis finished just below the prize winners.
Miroslav Radojcic (August 24, 1920 - January 14, 2000, 79 years old) was a Yugoslav National Master and USCF Master, but was probably more famous as one of Yugoslavia's most renowned political journalists for the paper Politika. During the 1960s he worked out of the United Nations in New York as Politika's foreign correspondent to the US, and later in the 1970s he was assigned the same post for London. He also contributed a long-running column for Chess Life called Observation Point.
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Back in 1967, terrible tempered Bobby Fischer walked out of the Interzonal in Sousse, Tunisia then re-entered only to walk out again. He fought with the officials, complained about the lights, objected to the noise, threatened to smash a news photographer's camera and, so far as his chess was concerned, he beat almost everybody; he was +7 -0 =3 when he left for good.
On the eve of his departure Fischer told an interviewer, “I’m leaving these patzers to fight against each other for the right to play against another patzer." Details…
In his Observation Point column of February, 1968, Radojcic more or less took Fischer’s side. He wrote that as Fischer’s friend, he sensed Fischer was haunted by feelings that amounted almost to a persecution mania and at the same time that his behavior was at times childish and illogical, insulting and undignified.”
Radojcic looked at Fischer’s behavior like a “wise theatrical director might”...stars are all a bit “silly” and the “the bigger the star, the greater the right to be silly.”
In Radojcic’s opinion the TD and tournament committee should have shown a little more leniency and used a little more diplomacy. He thought the actions of the officials only strengthened Fischer’s impression that everybody was being malicious wanted him to leave.
Radojcic pointed out that there were some other complaints about the tournament and the TD acted in a petty manner when he refused to move Fischer’s table to a location where the light was more to Fischer’s liking. They were playing in a vast room where there was a lot of empty space and in his game against Miguel Cuellar of Columbia both of them actually picked up their table and carried it to a different location.
The year 1964 was a good one for Radojcic...besides winning the North Central Open he finished in 2nd place in the US Open in Boston with Robert Byrne and James T. Sherwin behind Pal Benko and he won the Florida Open.
Radoicic style was described as smooth and uncluttered with imaginative strategy fortified by eclectic tactics that lead to positions where the fluidity of the pieces brought about about surprising denouements.
His opponent in the following game was James E. Warren of Lombard, Illinois, who passed away on December 12, 2014, at the age of 81. Warren worked for Western Electric (later AT&T Technologies) until a 1989 heart attack forced him to take an early retirement.
Warren was known for his contribution to Illinois chess as a player, organizer, patron and volunteer is. His wife Helen was a co-founder of the Illinois Chess Association.
As a USCF Expert, Warren was a prominent player in the Chicago Industrial Chess League back in the days when having a 2000+ rating was a big deal; masters were rare birds and GMs were mythical people living in far away places...you hardly ever saw one. Warren played Bobby Fischer twice on his 1964 simultaneous tour; they drew on March 22 and again on May 20, 1964.
After Professor Arpad Elo created his rating system, Warren was instrumental in its 1960 implementation by the USCF where he served as Rating Statistician, wrote a computer program for calculating ratings, and he suggested to Professor Elo that the Harkness System's classifications of Master, Expert, Class A, Class B, Class C should be included. It wasn’t until 1970, the Elo system was adopted by FIDE.
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