1954 US Championship

Grace Kelly

    The 1954 US Championship one of the weakest championships ever and it was the probably also the most poorly financed. It was also witnessed by a visiting delegation of Soviet Grandmasters who were to defeat the U.S. by a 20-12 score in a match a few weeks later. 

    The problem was that the US Chess Federation didn't have the money to hold the championship in a hotel exhibition room as it had in the past and as a last resort the Marshall Chess Club offered its rooms to the 14 players. 

    The winner, Arthur Bisguier, was 23 years old and he had just gotten out of the Army and he was attending college classes during the day. At night he ended up sleeping in one of the Marshall's upstairs apartments. 

    The field was relatively weak. At the time Bisguier was only eighth on the USCF's latest rating list, and Larry Evans, the defending champion, was only tenth. None of the five top rated players, Samuel Reshevsky, Robert Byrne, George Kramer, Donald Byrne and Arnold Denker had accepted invitations.

 

 

    Evans and Bisguier were the favorites, but they were expected to get get some competition from French emigre Rossolimo, the Manhattan Chess Club champion Max Pavey and the latest Marshall Chess Club junior star, James T. Sherwin. 

    As it happened, 20-year-old Sherwin, ranked only 24th, did take the early lead after five lively rounds, but he was unable to sustain the pace. Despite his success in many European tournaments Nicolas Rossolimo was not up to the task even though he had scored quite well in the recent US Open. 

    It was a close race though as the championship wasn’t decided until the last round when Evans was held to a draw by Herbert Seidman and Bisguier defeated Ariel Mengarini. 

    It’s hard to believe, but GM Larry M. Evans has been gone 14 years. He passed away on November 15, 2010 in Reno, Nevada from complications from gall bladder surgery. This is rather unusual. The gall bladder is a small sac-shaped organ beneath the liver in which bile is stored after secretion by the liver and before it is released into the intestine. Surgery on it is a safe operation and usually carries only a small risk of complications. In most people incision is small and the patient can go home the same day. 

    Evans was born into a Jewish family on March 22, 1932, in Manhattan. He learned a lot about chess by playing for ten cents an hour on 42nd Street in New York City. A prolific, if controversial, author of chess books, he won or shared the US.Chess Championship five times and the US Open Chess Championship four times. 

    His opponent in this game was Rabbi Saul Wachs who was a very strong Master. In the He lived in Columbus Ohio and in the 1960s was routinely winning events in the Midwest. Unfortunately he gave up chess to pursue his career as an educator. I believe Wachs was born in 1931 and it is possible that he is still with us...he would be 93 years old. 

    The following game is very interesting in that it shows how very difficult it is even for a very strong Master like Wachs to score against a player like Evans who was an IM (awarded in 1952) at the time and would get the GM title just three years after this game. Wachs made no serious errors...he was just outplayed. 

    This game is being presented in a different format that’s available using Fritz 17. I leave it to the reader to play through the variations!