It was a bad year for English chess. On January 31st Henry Atkins, born in 1872, died in Huddersfield, England at the age of 82. On May 16th England also lost chess historian H.J.R. Murray (born in 1868) who died at the age of 86. The English lost a third player on December 11th when R.C. Griffith died in Hendon. He was British champion in 1912 and co-author, with John H. White, of Modern Chess Openings. Then on December 17th they lost a fourth player, William Winter (born 1898) when he died in London of tuberculosis at the age of 57.
On November 25, Herman Steiner died at the age of 50 while playing in the California championship. He was defending his state title and finished his 5th round game (a 62-move draw against William Addison) when he said he didn’t feel well. His afternoon game was postponed and around 9:30 pm he had a fatal heart attack while being attended by a physician.
George Koltanowski set a new US record for simultaneous play by playing 110 boards in Los Angeles. It took him 12 hours and 10 minutes and he scored + 89 -4 =17.
In May Bobby Fischer played in his first official USCF tournament, the US Amateur in Lake Mohegan, New York and scored +2 -3 =1; he tied for 33rd place out of 75. Carmine Nigro was President of the Brooklyn Chess Club which is where he met Fischer and in 1951 became his first chess teacher. Nigro took the 12-year old Fischer, who only wanted to watch, to the tournament, but Nigro persuaded him to play and paid for his USCF membership and the $5 entry. Fischer’s post-tournament provisional rating was 1826.
In July, the USSR handed the US a humiliating defeat in Moscow by a score of 25-7. One bright bit of news came when Edmar Mednis took 2nd place with a 7-3 score in the world junior championship in Antwerp, Belgium. The tournament was won by Boris Spassky. A couple on months later Mednis won the New York State Championship in Cazenovia, NY.
The US Open in Long Beach, California was won by Nicholas Rossolimo on tiebreaks over Samuel Reshevsky. In August Charles Kalme won the US Junior Championship in Lincoln, Nebraska. Fischer was way down in 20th place.
The big international news was the Gothenburg, Sweden Interzonal which was won by David Bronstein.
In the 38th Marshall Chess Club Championship Franklin Howard and William Lombardy tied for first. The club’s main rival was the Manhattan Chess Club and Lombardy also played in their championship tournament.
The Manhattan Chess Club was founded in 1877 and started with three dozen men, eventually increasing to hundreds, with women allowed as members from 1938. It was the second-oldest chess club in the United States (next to the Mechanics' Institute Chess Club in San Francisco) before it closed in 2002.
The Manhattan’s list of champions includes some pretty impressive names: Eugene Delmer, Simon Lipschutz, Major James Hanham, Albert Hodges, Frank Marshall, Paul F. Johner, Abraham Kupcik, Oscar Chajes, David Janowski, Morris Shapiro, Geza Maroczy, Isaac Kashdan, Albert Simonson, Arnold Denker, Albert Pinkus, Alex Kevitz, Arthur Bisguier, George Shainswit, George Kramer, Max Pavey, Pal Benko, Paul Brandts, Bernard Zuckerman, Walter Shipman, Arthur Feuerstein, Joel Benjamin, John Fedorowicz, Vitaly Zaltsman, Michael Rohde, Kamran Shirazi, John Fedorowicz and Alex Wojtkiewicz to name just a few.
In the 1955 club championship Max Pavey, the club champion in 1953, regained his title by scoring 13-3 in the 1955/56 renewal of the annual championship. He suffered a lone loss to Arthur Feuerstein while defeating his closest rivals William Lombardy and Albert Pinkus.
I played two postal games against Feuerstein in the Chess Review Golden Knights. In the preliminaries in 1970 I caught him in a trap in the opening and won a Pawn. Thinking I couldn’t get more than a draw in the ending, I went for his K with a nifty 5 move deep combination, but he saw a couple of moves deeper than I did and dazzled me with some tactics that netted him a R. Two years later we met in the finals. We were following a line in an opening booklet on the Sicilian that had a mistake in the analysis which I only realized after it was too late. Feuerstien had the same booklet and was aware of the mistaken analysis. I was busted and resigned after 29 moves.
In the ‘55 Manhattan Championship Abe Turner started out with four straight wins, but then only scored two points in the remaining eleven rounds! Pavey got off to a slow start and Feuerstein was in the lead with 8.0-2.0 at the end of ten rounds, but failed to maintain his early pace.
Lombardy suffered losses in the sixth and seventh rounds then made a strong finish, but it was too late. Thanks to their risky style of play Bisguier and Denker had a rough time.
Final standings:
1) Max Pavey 12.0
2-3) William Lombardy and Albert Pinkus 10.5
4) Arnold Denker 10.0
5) Arthur Feuerstein 9.5
6-7) Alex Kevitz and Arthur Bisguier 8.5
8) SidneyBernstein 8.0
9) Martin Harrow 7.5
10) Reuben Klugman 6.5
11-12) Abe Turner and Morton Siegel 6.0
13) Benjamin Owens 5.5
14) Raul Benedicto 4.5
15) M. Schroeder 3.5
16) A, Reiter 3.0
In the following game after 8 moves things look a little boring, but by move 13 the game starts to look like it could get interesting. Then at move 17 Denker went astray and miscalculated. Three moves later he tried to hornswoggle Feuerstein, but it didn't work and Feuerstein managed to thread his way through some tricky play to keep the win in hand.
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