In 1943 the top players in the world were Samuel Reshevsky, Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Botvinnik, Max Euwe, Paul Keres, Vassily Smyslov, Gideon Stahlberg and Miguel Najdorf. The two players that rounded out the top 10 seem a little surprising: Paul Schmidt and Al Horowitz.
Paul Schmidt (1916 – 1984) was originally from Estonia, emigrated to Germany in the autumn of 1939. In 1951, he earned a PhD in chemistry from Heidelberg University, moved first to Canada and then to the United States, settling in Philadelphia, where he took a job as a professor. Later, he and his wife Eva moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he made contributions to electrochemistry and anodic oxidation of silicon, was expert in neutron activation analysis, and published many papers, until his retirement in 1982. He continued playing occasional games of chess, regularly visiting Reuben Fine in New York.
Israel Albert Horowitz (November 15, 1907 – January 18, 1973) is better known but mostly as an author and the man behind Chess Review magazine. Little is known of his childhood, but he used to tell how rabbis frequently visited his home and would sit around debating the Talmud and nobody seems to know exactly when or how he learned to play chess.
If you look in Wikipedia you won’t find much information. It tells us Horowitz was the chess columnist for The New York Times, writing three columns a week for ten years. He was the owner and editor of Chess Review magazine from 1933 until it was bought out and taken over by the United States Chess Federation in 1969 and merged into Chess Life.
Chess Review was founded in 1933 as a partnership between Horowitz and Isaac Kashdan. Kashdan dropped out after just a few issues and Horowitz became sole owner. Before that, Horowitz had been a securities trader on Wall Street. He had been partners with chess masters Maurice Shapiro, Mickey Pauley, Albert Pinkus and Maurice Wertheim, but when the depression years struck and he couldn’t make a living he quit Wall Street and began hustling chess. According to Arnold Denker, Horowitz returned to chess on the theory that he could always win a quarter and that was enough to buy a meal.
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| Today apples cost 10 times as much |
During the depression for those lucky enough to be working, the average wage was about $100 a month and a quarter was worth almost $5.00 these days. I remember my dad, who was one of the lucky few to remain employed on the railroad during the Great Depression, telling me that he and my mother bought a house from the bank for $600. The banker told them he had repossessed the house three times and didn't want to see it again.
It was in 1933 that he got the idea for a chess magazine filed with interesting articles and photographs and Chess Review was born. To keep the magazine afloat Horowitz wrote a lot of books, mostly aimed at beginners, and toured the country, sometimes for months at a time, giving exhibitions and free simultaneous exhibitions in return for subscribers. It was on one such tour in 1940 that he and Harold Morton were involved in a car accident in which Morton was killed and Horowitz seriously injured.
Denker described how Horowitz “burned the candle at both ends.” In a typical day he would put in a full day at Chess Review then pop in at the Marshall Chess Club around 7pm. At about 11pm he would be at the Manhattan Chess Club playing skittles. When the chess was over he would head to his favorite delicatessen for a hot dog and beans or a hot pastrami sandwich “to chase the one he ate for lunch” as Denker put it. After that, he go to bead around 4am.
A review of more than 7,000 clinical studies examining the connection between diet and health came to a stark conclusion that no one should eat processed meats. This includes bacon and hot dogs, cold cuts like pastrami, salami, ham and corned beef which are high in high-calorie saturated fat and bad for your heart. Add to this life style the fact that he smoked three packs of cigarettes a day and one wonder how he lived to be 65 years old.
He retired in 1969 after he sold Chess Review to the USCF and with the exception of correspondence chess, all vestiges of Chess Review disappeared. His heath deteriorated rapidly after that and he left this world in 1973.
It’s said Reshevsky never studied chess or prepared for games, but I always found that hard to believe. His wife, Norma, said he did not have a chess set except for a small magnetic set that he might occasionally take out to look at a game and that he had no chess books in his library except the ones he wrote, or at least had his name on them. It’s believed his books were actually ghosted by Fred Reinfeld.
I know he did study openings early in his career and he prepared for his 1942 match with Kashdan. Also, in his book The Bobby Fischer I Knew, Denker gave a game between Horowitz and Reshevsky from a training match to prepare Reshevsky for the upcoming 1948 world championship tournament and as far as I know, it’s only known game from that match. But, clearly Reshevsky did, at least to some extent, occasionally prepare for matches and tournaments. It seems one would need more than a pocket set to do that.
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