Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Hastings 1949/50

Szabo
     The 25th Hastings Christmas Chess Festival was held from December 29th, 1949 to January 7th, 1950. 
     Chess Review magazine had belittled the status of the previous tournament (1948/49) by pointing out that the tournament had reached its peak in 1934/35 when Capablanca, Euwe, Botvinnik, Flohr and Lilienthal played. 
     Chess Review opined that English chess fans must have felt like underprivileged children because the 1948/49 tournament had slipped to the status of local competition with a “sparse leavening of second rate foreign players.” Harsh! 
     The magazine went on to say the best of these second rate foreign players was the “stringy, hollow cheeked Nicolas Rossolimo, a Greek born in Russia and living in France.” The magazine also claimed that his four wins and five draws “in this mediocre field” showed that he was no world beater. 
Rossolimo

     Curious about just how good Rossolimo was in 1950, I went to Chessmetrics and discovered he was ranked, at 2654, number 23 in the world four different months between the January 1950 and the May 1951 rating lists. Thus he was in the neighborhood of players like, among others, Averbakh, Bogoljubow, Lilienthal, Salo Flohr, Bondarevsky, Taimanov, Euwe, Pachmann, Rossetto, Barcza, Ragozin etc. He remained in the top 50 until the mid-1950s. Maybe he wasn’t a world beater, but he was pretty good! 
     Chess Review also had biting words for Paul Schmidt (6th place +1 -1 =7) and Robert Wade (8th place +1 -3 =5) stating that both had “failed to distinguish themselves.” 
     The magazine was especially critical of Schmidt, pointing out that his moment of glory came in 1937 when he finished ahead of Keres, Stahlberg and Flohr in an Estonian tournament, but in this tournament “proved unequal to the chore of winning games...but was at least able to draw them.” Of poor Wade the magazine commented he “was not any too good at that.” 
Schmidt in later years
     The criticism of Schmidt seems unfair because at the time he was working on earning his PhD in chemistry from Heidelberg University which he got in 1951. After receiving his degree he moved to Canada and from there to Philadelphia and later a place that’s hardly a chess Mecca, Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he made contributions to electrochemistry and anodic oxidation of silicon, was expert in neutron activation analysis, and published many papers, till his retirement in 1982. So, it would appear that at Hastings, Schmidt was on his way to all but giving up a career in chess. Chessmetrics ranks him Number 9 in the world 15 different months between the November 1942 and August 1944 with a 2600+ rating. 
      The 1949/50 event was an improvement over the previous Hastings.  In addition to the winner of the previous event (Rossolimo) there were former world champion Max Euwe and Hungarian GM Laszlo Szabo who had been a top European player since he burst onto the chess scene in 1935 when at the age of 18 he won the Hungarian Championship. This was Szabo’s third win at Hastings. 
     Also playing was 17-year old Larry Evans, who was in those days described as a prodigy. Larry M. Evans (March 22, 1932 – November 15, 2010) won or shared the US Championship five times and the US Open four times. He wrote a long-running syndicated chess column and wrote or co-wrote more than twenty chess books. 
     Evans first won his first championship in 1951 ahead of Samuel Reshevsky, and his last in 1980 when he tied with Walter Browne and Larry Christiansen. He was awarded the IM title in 1952 and the GM title in 1957. 
     Evans was born in Manhattan and learned much about the game by playing for ten cents an hour on 42nd Street in New York City. At age 14, he tied for 4th–5th place in the Marshall Chess Club championship. The next year he won it outright, becoming the youngest Marshall champion at that time. He finished equal second in the 1947 US Junior Championship and in 1948, at the age of 16, he played in the US Championship and tied for eighth place with 11.5-7.5.
     Evans tied with Arthur Bisguier for first place in the US Junior Championship in 1949. Evans didn’t have much respect for his mother and didn’t treat her very well and Bisguier didn’t like it...that is until he met the woman. Bisguier didn’t elaborate on what the problem with Mrs. Evans was.

2 comments:

  1. "Evans didn’t have much respect for his mother and didn’t treat her very well and Bisguier didn’t like it...that is until he met the woman"

    That cries out for more explanation!

    ReplyDelete