The idea was that the top two finishers in each state's championship would be invited to play and if one of them could not participate, the state could send a replacement. The site of the event rotated among the three states.
Originally, the side events consisted of state matches, but full participation by all three states was hard to achieve. In 1949, a Junior event was started and in 1951, an Open Tournament was initiated. The Tri-State Junior Championship was a separate event until 1955 when it was determined that the highest finisher in the Open would be the Junior Champion.
Clocks: Because the 1946 event had a shortage of clocks, the following year one of the players suggested that the Association start a fund to buy clocks for the next championship, but there were no clocks on the market because production had been discontinued during the war. As a result, several players made their own clocks and one produced by the brother of one of the players was said to actually resemble those sold commercially. And so, the 1948 tournament was the first state championship where clocks were used.
The final standings were:
The championship was played November 12-14, 1948 in Wheeling, West Virginia and was won by Herman Hesse of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania after a one game playoff win over Rainer Sachs of Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
Pennsylvania didn’t enter a team in the team championship which was won by Ohio by a score of 7.5-4.5 over West Virginia.
The state champions were Dietz (PA), Werthammer and Hurt were WV co-champions and Sterns (OH). The other players were the runners up in their state championship.
Rainer (Ray) Sachs was 16 years old and I could only find a couple of mentions of him. The first was in the January 1947 issue of Chess Life when junior players met at the Cleveland Public Library where on January 11th, John Hoy, Ohio State Champion, found going tough in a simultaneous exhibition and was forced to concede six wins and three draws to the juniors. Winners were: William Granger (Glenville High), Rainer Sachs (Roxboro Junior High), Alfred Robbotoy (West Tech.), Norman Saunders (Cathedral Latin). Richard Christopher (Cathedral Latin) and Jim Harkins (Shaker Heights). Draws went to Bernard Berkman (Grenville), Fred Bartell (Lincoln), and Donald Latnik (Fairfax Elementary). Old time Ohio players will no doubt fondly remember the venerable Jim Harkins.
The January 1954 issue of Chess Review reported that the Central New York State Championship was won by “former Cleveland kingpin Rainer Sachs with a score of 5-1. Equaling Sachs’ score but losing a play-off was Arthur W. Wood, several times titleholder of the Syracuse city championship."
Then I discovered there is a Rainer Kurt "Ray" Sachs (born June 13, 1932, making him 16 years old at the time of this tournament) who is a German-American computational radiation biologist and astronomer. There was no mention of chess, but considering the man’s professional accomplishments it stands to reason that he didn’t have time for it.
Sachs was co-author of the Sachs–Wolfe effect, which concerns a property of the Cosmic microwave background radiation. He and Ronald Kantowski were responsible for the Kantowski–Sachs dust solutions to the Einstein field equation. These are a widely used family of inhomogeneous cosmological models.
Sachs was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1932, a son of the German Jewish metallurgist George Sachs. In 1937 the family left Germany to flee from Nazi persecution and settled in the United States, so Rainer Sachs is generally considered an American scientist.
He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from MIT and his PhD in theoretical physics from Syracuse University. From 1969 to 1993, he was Professor of Math and Physics at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), and from 1993 he has been Professor Emeritus at UCB. In 1994, he was appointed Research Professor of Mathematics UCB, and since 2005 he has been an Adjunct Professor at the Tufts medical school. Until 1985, he worked on general relativistic cosmology and astrophysics.
With Hung-Hsi Wu he co-wrote the books General Relativity for Mathematicians and General Relativity and Cosmology. His contributions include joint work on the Sachs-Wolfe effect and the Ehlers-Geren-Sachs theorem, both of which deal with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. From 1985, he has worked in mathematical and computational biology, especially radiation biology. His work in radiobiology has included research on radiation and cancer.
Same guy? I can’t be sure, but it’s quite probable that he is especially since in 1954 Sachs won the Central New York State Championship and got his PhD from Syracuse University which is the right location.
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| Rainer Sachs in 2002 |
The two Sachs vs. Hesse games were the ones that decided the championship. As described in the West Virginia Chess Bulletin, Sachs had defeated Hesse in a difficult Pawn ending in their tournament game which was played on Saturday. It was adjourned after 70 moves. Sachs had claimed a draw by repetition, but it turned out that while it was the same position, it was not the same player to move. They ended up finishing the game in the wee hours of Sunday morning and it looked to be drawn, but on move 105 Sachs blundered and then resigned on move 108.
At the end of the tournament with both players tied, Sachs debated whether to stick around for the playoff game or let Hesse have the title by default. Elliot Sterns was leaving for home and told Sachs to stay and go for the title promising that when he (Sterns) got back to Cleveland he would call Sachs’ parents and high school principal and explain that he might not be home in time for school Monday morning. For his part, Hesse was willing to make arrangements for the playoff game to be played at a later date when it was more convenient.
Sachs stayed and the game turned into a rough and tumble affair that finally ended up in Hesse’s favor.
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