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Monday, October 14, 2019

Weinberger vs Witeczek, A Master Game

Witeczek
     Jack Witeczek (August 1, 1937 - June 1, 1983, 45 years old) was born in Lodz, Poland, and came to the US in 1958 and at the time I remember him he was living in Lorain, Ohio. In 1960 he won the Ohio Championship with a perfect scores of 7-0. Other players who have done so are Walter Mann (1949), Harald Miller (1951), Richard Kause (1959) and Calvin Blocker (1961 and 1962).
     Harald Miller, of Beachwood, Ohio, died on April 3, 2014, two months shy of his 85th birthday. He was born in Vienna, Austria, on June 8, 1929. He was a lifelong Expert. 
     He rarely talked about his Holocaust experiences, but in a writing that was discovered the night before his funeral he recalled how he and his identical twin brother, George who was Ohio Champion in 1962, were barely 9 years old when German troops marched in and Hitler took over Austria. On Kristallnacht, their father was taken to Dachau and for months their mother negotiated with the Gestapo to achieve her husband’s ultimate release. She was somehow successful and in 1939, the family fled to Africa. 
     In 1941, the family received sponsorship from a member of the Cleveland, Ohio Jewish community whom they did not know and with whom they merely shared a family name to come to America and to settle in Cleveland. 
     Harald graduated from Cleveland Heights High School in 1948, where he and his brother were champion debaters. He earned his Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Adelbert College of Western Reserve University in 1951. Thirty years later he obtained his M.B.A. from John Carroll University in 1981. 
     For 40 years he was a certified public accountant in private practice, including in a firm with his twin brother (who predeceased him), which he eventually merged into another firm. At the age of 65 he joined Merrill Lynch as an investment consultant and later becams an independent financial adviser. 
     He was a member of the City Club of Cleveland and the Cleveland Racquet Club, and served as vice president of The Temple-Tifereth Israel and president of the Beachwood Kiwanis. 
     Witeczek was one of a small group of players who fled Hungary during the Revolution in 1956. Pal Benko (1928-2019) initially lived in Cleveland and Lajos Szedlacsek (1910-1964) remained in town where he had a short but major impact on Ohio chess in the late 1950s.
     In 1960, Witeczek won the Ohio Championship and in 1964, he won the Michigan Championship. He appeared on the cover of the October 1966 issue of Chess Review for winning the 12th Annual Golden Knights Postal Chess Championship and the First Annual United States Open Postal Championship, which began in 1958. He had 23 wins and one draw in the event. 
     Witeczek had a PhD degree in physical chemistry and was co-author of Experimental investigations on the light scattering of colloidal spheres published in 1970.
Weinberger
     Tibor Weinberger (born November 27, 1932) in Hungary is a FIDE Master and USCF Senior Master. While in Hungary, Weinberger played in five Hungarian championships from 1952 through 1956. He came to the United States in 1957.
     In 1957, he won the New Jersey Open. In 1958, he won the New Jersey State Championship and the Nebraska Open. In 1959, he won the California State Open, the Southern California Championship, and the 26th California Chess Championship. 
     In 1961, he tied for 1st place with Irving Rivise in the California championship. In 1963, he tied for 1st place in the California State Open. In 1964, 1966 and 1967, he won the Pacific Southwest Open. 
     In 1968, he played in the U.S. Championship in New York, taking 11th place, won the Santa Monica Masters, the West Coast Open, the San Bernadino Open and the Long Beach Open. In the 1968 National Open he shared second place with William Lombardy, behind Pal Benko with a 7–1 score. His performance included wins over Larry Evans and the 1967 World Junior Champion Julio Kaplan, and a draw with Benko. 
     In 1973, he won the California Open Championship. In 1975, he played in the Cleveland International Tournament, but finished at the bottom. 
     The following game was played in the 1961 U.S. Open that was held in San Francisco. Pal Benko won his first of eight U.S. Open titles by winning his last four games. Fellow Hungarian transplant Zoltan Kovacs took second place, with former champions Arthur Bisguier and Robert Byrne tying for 3rd-4th. Weinberger tied for places 25-38 with a 7.5-4.5 score. Witeczek scored only a point more but it allowed him to finish tied for places 7-12. There were 197 entrants. 

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