About the only thing anybody remembers is the Bishop throwing incident involving Bernard Zuckerman and a spectator. Zuckerman kept asking a butthead spectator who was sitting near him and yapping away to be quiet and when he wouldn't, it was reported that Zuckerman threw a Bishop at the guy. I was there and, yes, it really happened, but to be honest “throw” is too strong a word. Zuckerman actually tossed it rather softly. The guy wouldn’t return the Bishop so the TD got a replacement.
Other things I remember: the chess clocks were the fairly new Heuer Champion clocks and they were very noisy when the button was pushed causing Andy Soltis to comment "They sound like a time bomb going off." Nineteen year old Larry Christiansen (born June 27, 1956,) who was to go on to win the US Championship in 1980, 1983, and 2002, was impressive.
And, there was an incident involving GM Jim Tarjan. I was watching a National Master explaining a position to a small group when Tarjan walked by on his way to the coffee machine. Tarjan stopped and looked at the board for a few seconds and moved on. On his way back the Master was asking, “What can black do?” Tarjan never said a word but he had seen more in those few brief seconds than the Master had in the several minutes he was explaining the position. Tarjan bashed out a few moves that refuted the Master’s analysis then returned to his game leaving the Master sitting there nonplussed. GMs see a lot in a short amount of time...amazing!
You will search in vain for information on this tournament which was won by Hungarian GM Istvan Csom (born June 2, 1940). My set of tournament bulletins has long disappeared. James R. Schroeder published a book on it back in 1975, but that’s about it. Even Chess365 only has a handful of games from the event and it’s not listed at all in Chessgames.com.
I can’t be sure of the order of finish (except for Csom), but the players were: Istvan Csom, Florian Gheorghiu, Predrag Ostojic, Miguel Quinteros, Julio Kaplan, Edmar Mednis, Leonid Shamkovich, Eugenio Torre, James Tarjan, Andrew Soltis, Bernard Zuckerman, Larry Christiansen, John Grefe and Peter Biyiasas. Personally, I figured Shamkovich would do better, but his performance was disappointing. I was also pulling for Tarjan because I liked his aggressive style, but he, too, wasn't especially impressive. Andy Soltis was a nice guy...very friendly.
The opponents in following game were John Grefe and Edmar Mednis. John Grefe (September 6, 1947 - December 22, 2013) was an IM whose best result was a tie for first with Lubomir Kavalek in the 1973 US Championship. His style was exciting and he was, I think, of GM strength, but in those days the title was a lot harder to get. Chessmetrics assigns him a rating of 2655 in 1973. Other players in that grouping includes the likes of Borislav Ivkov, Laszlo Szabo, Mark Taimanov, Wolfgang Uhlmann, Zoltan Ribli and Fridrik Olafsson. The closest Grefe ever got to international tournaments was at the Lone Pine events in the 1970s. He died of liver cancer in San Francisco, California.
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Edmar Mednis (March 22, 1937 – February 13, 2002) was born in Latvia and was a popular and respected chess writer. Mednis' family were refugees in 1944 during World War II. As displaced persons, Edmar and his two sisters, with parents Edvin and Marita Mednis, were permitted to emigrate to the United States in 1950.
Mednis was trained as a chemical engineer, then worked as a stockbroker, but became best known as a chess author. He wrote 26 chess books and hundreds of chess articles. Mednis finished second in the 1955 World Junior Championship behind Boris Spassky (the two drew their game) and was the first player to beat Bobby Fischer in a US Championship. He died of complications from pneumonia.
According to Robert Byrne, Mednis often provoked his opponents to countergambits such as the Two Knights Defense so that he could seize material and show off his considerable defensive skill. But against opponents who refused to take risks, Mednis wouldn’t either and preferred to develop logically and to sniff out positional weaknesses.
Suspicious of hectic, early attacks, he was convinced that solid, conservative preparation was necessary before launching aggression. With Black, Mednis distrusted loose or overextended P-formations and avoided them by setting up hedgehog P-formations confined to three ranks. Typical of this concept as black was his predilection for the Rauzer Sicilian.
A word about the following game...Robert Byrne’s annotations in the New York Times are in some places the direct opposite of Stockfish 10’s. So, who (or what) are you going to believe? Not being strong enough to know, I have included the opinion of both in the notes.
http://uscf1-nyc1.aodhosting.com/CL-AND-CR-ALL/CL-ALL/1975/1975_08.pdf shows up in a Google search. See page 491 and following for crosstable and story.
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