In 1967-1971 chess activity increased throughout the state. No longer were players playing primarily for the honor and the glory. They wanted the money. Class tournaments started being held, where players would compete in the Class A, Class B or Class C sections for big cash prizes.
Strong new players developed either because they were young players who just got better or because they came to California from other places or both.
Examples of both were Walter Shawn Browne and Julio Kaplan, both of whom came to California at age 17. Browne was born in Australia but grew up in Brooklyn. When he came to California in 1967 he was already the US Junior Champion. He proceeded to win almost every tournament he played in, including the California State Championship. See pages 9, 26, 46.
Julio Kaplan came to California after having won the World Junior Championship. He did not play as actively as Browne and won only a few tournaments. Unlike Browne, whose stay in California was relatively brief, Kaplan made his permanent home in Berkeley California and established a chess computer software company that developed chess computer programs for variety of machines.
Another new player was future grandmaster James Tarjan who won both the California Junior Championship and the Pacific Southwest Open at age 16. See pages 126, 134. Future grandmaster Larry Christiansen and future International Masters Kim Commons and John Grefe also appeared at this time. (Commons was certainly grandmaster strength but he quit chess before getting the title.)
A great new series of tournaments was established in Lone Pine in 1970. It eventually became annually the strongest Swiss System tournament in the world. First winner was Larry Evans who moved to nearby Reno, Nevada.
The new player who had the biggest impact on the California Chess Reporter was Jude Acers, who moved here from New Orleans. Acers won several tournaments. See page 139. Acers proceeded to provide numerous articles and chess analysis that filled up the pages of the California Chess Reporter. If you read it here, it was probably written by Acers.
On a negative side, two of California’s leading players committed suicide. I will not give their names because the causes of deaths is disputed. One was a former State Champion of California who died on February 14, 1972 in Los Angeles.
A new group of tournament organizers took over. Almost all the biggest tournaments in Northern California were now organized by Mike Goodall. You will see on Page 314 that the following directors were recognized by the California State Chess Federation: Isaac Kashdan, George Koltanowski, Guthrie McClain, Gordon Barrett, Darrell Rader, Mike Goodall and Ted Yudacufski.
Goodall also improved in his results as a player. He won the Castle Chess Club Championship over a field that consisted of mostly masters and strong experts. See page 54.
On the negative side, the biggest organizer in Southern California, Herbert T. Able, died on March 19, 1970. His obituary in on page 392. He was one of the founders of the American Open. Almost all of the big tournaments in Santa Monica in the 1960s were organized by Able.
In spite of the increase in chess activity throughout the state, the California State Chess Federation showed signs of crumbling. The end was near. The two biggest and most important events were having trouble being held. The North-South Match had been held annually since 1926. This was not just a chess event but a social event as well. It was held at a central meeting place, usually Fresno or San Luis Obispo, and the Southern players would drive up and the Northern players would drive down for this one game event. Then, after the game, old friends would meet and have dinner and perhaps a few drinks. They would proudly brag about how many of these annual events they had been to. See page 127-130.
However, in 1970 the organizers decided to hold a class tournament instead. This is reported on page 464. This was the death knell as the North-South Matches never resumed.
The California State Championship had long been an event of great prestige. It was a ten-player round robin and to get in a player had to win or finish near the top of a qualifying tournament. Usually it was an all-master event.
However, suddenly it was difficult to find suitable players willing to play. Both the 1968 and 1969 California State Championships were marred by players not showing up or dropping out or protesting a result and refusing to continue.
The next event was held as the 1970-1971 State Championship. Many of the players who had qualified by wining an event then declined to play. Those who finished lower in the standings and took their places were often not especially strong players. Basically, instead of an all master event it was primarily a bunch of experts competing. See page 485.
The shape of things to come arrived with Bill Goichberg holding his first Continental Open in Los Angeles in 1970. See page 465. Goichberg tournaments are controversial because he charges high entry fees and awards big cash prizes, often $100,000 or better. He is thought of as “The Walmart of Chess” because his big tournaments tend to put the little mom-and-pop chess organizers out of business.
William Addison started playing actively again in Northern California. He had stopped playing for a while because we were too weak for him. However, with the arrival of newer stronger players he found suitable competition and he did not even always win.
His greatest result was the 1969-1970 US Championship where he scored 5-1 in the first six rounds. He was way ahead but lost some games and was caught by Reshevsky. In the last round, Addison beat Lombardy. I was there. As this finished him in second place, he was qualified to play in the 1970 Interzonal for the World Chess Championship.
However, his result in the Interzonal was disappointing, as he finished only 18th. He played in just one more tournament and then quit chess forever.
This was a great loss as he was a genuine nice guy and helpful to the chess careers of everybody, as well as being a strong player.
In 1996, I was riding up the elevator in the Mechanics Institute and I recognized him in the elevator. He was not going to the chess club. Instead he was going to the business library on the second floor. He said to me “nice weather”, or something like that. Then, when I realized who he was, I asked him if he would come back and play chess again. He replied, “No. Absolutely not. Never.”
I do not know why he was so absolutely opposed to returning to chess, but I suppose it was because he felt he had wasted many years of his life playing.
William G. Addison died on October 29, 2008.
William Addison had continued as director of the Chess Room at the Mechanics Institute until 1969. He had been appointed following the death of Arthur B. Stamer, who had been the director, secretary or associated with the Mechanics Institute for more than 50 years. Stamer won the First Premier Tournament of the Mechanics Institute in 1908. He was Chess Director from 1951 to 1963. He died on February 27, 1964 in San Francisco, when he was not quite 80 years old.
A long series of Stamer Memorial tournaments were thereafter held, usually directed by Mike Goodall. His son, Chet Stamer, played in these events and usually did remarkably well. Chet Stamer nearly won one of the Stamer Memorial tournaments.
Walter Browne moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1967 and started winning all the tournaments here. He had been involved in a “romantic interlude” during the 1966 US Open in Seattle, Washington which I know all about because, of course, I was directly involved. I had met and spoken to the girl, who was from Los Angeles.
San Quentin Prison had consistently won the Bay Area Industrial League, even though the best player on their team, Paul Quillen, had taken a temporary leave of absence. San Quentin always played all of their matches “at home”. The prisoners always easily beat the nuclear scientists at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratories.
However, in the 1968 Bay Area Industrial League, a shocking upset occurred when the San Quinten Prisoners lost to the team from the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. See page 92.
There were several reasons for this upset. The Rad Lab had acquired some strong new players, David Blohm, Arthur Wang and Michael Goodall. On the other hand, not only had their best player, Paul Quillen, taken a temporary leave of absence, but the entire team had been let out of prison on good behavior. The result was a new lineup with a new set of prisoners upholding the honor of the San Quinten Prison Team.
Unfortunately, the California Chess Reporter often did not provide the names of the players on the San Quinten team. However, the players in the final championship match, that San Quinten lost, were N. Mihailoviki, W. Chamberlain, E. Albrecht, W. Allen, A. McFarlin, E. Deriso. None of these are known tournament players. They were beaten by a team led by Arthur Wang and David Blohm. See page 156. There goes the neighborhood! Prisoners are just not what they used to be!
Paul Quillen stayed out of prison for long enough to do well several important events. Quillen beat Grandmaster Pal Benko in the National Open in Las Vegas. Quillen finished second in the 1968 West Coast Open, behind Tibor Weinberger and ahead of Benko and other strong players. However, this 1968 event seems to provide the last listing for Quillen in a tournament. He probably went back to prison not long after this.
Nobody knows whatever happened to Paul Quillen but the Federal Prisoner Locator at bop.org says that a person named Paul D. Quillen was released from federal prison on June 8, 1998. His name does not appear in the Social Security Death Index, so it seems likely that he is still alive.
In 1968, Larry Remlinger came back to tournament chess after a ten-year absence. In 1958, Bob Eastwood, organizer of the US Junior in Homestead Florida, had made a deal with the USCF that the winner of the US Junior got invited to the US Championship. Larry Remlinger had tied for first with Raymond Weinstein in the 1958 US Junior, in which I also played. Remlinger was ahead on tie-breaking points. However, in the last round, Max Burkett, a rated Class B player, scored an upset by defeating James Bennett, a rated expert. This gave Weinstein, who had played Burkett, an extra tie-breaking point over Remlinger who had played Bennett. This extra tie-breaking point put Raymond Weinstein in the US Championship by ½ tie-breaking point instead of Larry Remlinger.
Remlinger gave up chess almost immediately thereafter, although he came back ten years later. Raymond Weinstein scored 5 draws for 2 ½ points in the US Championship, not a great result but a credible result. However, as has often been pointed out, Weinstein went crazy in 1965 and has been locked up in the Insane Asylum ever since. So, if Max Burkett had not defeated James Bennett in the last round of the 1958 US Junior, then Remlinger would have been the winner on tie-breaking points, and Remlinger would have played in the US Championship and perhaps he would have gone insane whereas perhaps Raymond Weinstein would have quit chess and stayed out of the lunatic asylum.
There was rising tension between Northern California and Southern California. You can see a discussion of the issues on pages 293-296 and 308 of the 1961-1964 Volume of California Chess Reporter. Once major cause of this trouble was the seeding system into the prestigious California State Championship
Southern California had a larger population and therefore more players, but Northern California had more top level strong players. Even today, the situation is the same. There are no grandmasters native to Southern California but several grandmasters in Northern California. Also, nowadays Southern California is just about the most inactive chess area of the USA whereas Northern California is the most active area of the country compared to its population size.
The result was it was agreed that Southern California would get to quality four players into the California State Championship, Northern California three, the Central Valley one, the California Open Champion one and the Defending Champion one, for a total of ten players.
Southern California wanted to change it from 4 to 3 to 5 to 2 in favor of Southern California. Northern California wanted to make sure all three players it sent were strong so it would not lose its coveted three slots. This helps explain why a game was allegedly thrown to keep a certain (weak) player out of the state championship.
It was not until a decade later that Northern California and Southern California finally got officially divorced for chess purposes, therefore causing the California Chess Reporter to stop publishing in 1976.
Most sensational of all however was the departure of Sam Sloan from California. On Christmas Eve 1967, I left California to go to play in the US Intercollegiate Championship in Hoboken, New Jersey. I planed to return in two weeks but did not return for 14 years until 1981.
Although widely rumored, it was not true that I was “run out of town” in Berkeley. It was true that my little student club I had established at the time of the Berkeley student revolution had attracted too much attention.
When I did finally come back in 1981, it was strictly on a business trip, as I was Acting President of Canaveral Capital Corporation, a SBIC in receivership. I came to Las Vegas, Riverside, Los Angeles, Berkeley and San Francisco on this business trip.
Even though this was strictly business, some monumental events occurred.
I brought my new wife, Honzagool, from Chitral Pakistan, with me on this trip. She got pregnant on this trip and nine months later she gave birth to our daughter, Shamema.
When I was in San Francisco I found out that my old friend Bobby Fischer needed a place to stay.
By then the world was Searching for Bobby Fischer, which was made into a movie by that title years later.
Bobby Fischer was in San Francisco, in hiding. Fischer was not the easiest person to accommodate. We all knew the rules: Nobody was supposed to be allowed to know where Fischer was. When talking about Fischer, we could not even use the word “Fischer”. We had to call him “that guy” or use some other code word. Fischer had to be moved surreptitiously. He also refused to pay for anything. Jim Buff, Steve Brandwein, Jay Whitehead’s mother, Loretta Chardin, Peter Biyiasas and his devoted wife Ruth Haring were all involved in this effort.
There was only one benefit to any person who was willing to help Fischer, and that was to have access to the mind of the great genius, plus to learn a few good chess moves.
By the time I was ready to return to New York in February 1981, it was settled that Fischer would stay with Biyiasas.
I was captain and organizer of the University of California at Berkeley Chess Team. Without me, the team would not even have existed. We competed successfully in the Bay Area Chess League, winning or finishing near the top every year we played. See for example, page 96 of this California Chess Reporter 1964-1967. I often did not get to play in the matches even though I was team captain and had organized them, because we had a lot of strong players on the UC Campus and there were stronger or higher rated players than me who were available to play. I always had better results when playing as a member of the team than I had when playing in individual events.
UC Berkeley did not send a competitive team to the 1964 US Intercollegiate Championship because I had a job working in New York City, nor did it send a team to the 1965 US Intercollegiate championship because I attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico to learn Spanish that semester. The situation was that if I did not do all the work of organizing the teams, there was nobody else there to do it.
By the Fall of 1966 I was back as a student at Berkeley so I organized a team for the US Intercollegiate Championship at Penn State University at State College, Pennsylvania.
We had a strong team and again we tied for the championship. This time our rival was MIT. We both had the same number of game points but they had a ½ more tie-breaking point of the sums of their opponents, so they were declared the champions.
In 1967 we sent a team again but this time the team was organized by Mike Goodall. I actually got on the team as a last minute replacement. I was selected over another player who had a higher rating than me but I was chosen because I had just beaten Walter Browne in the American Open.
This time we had travel money so I did not have to hitchhike or take a Greyhound Bus as before. Our team consisted of Frank Thornally, Steve Spencer, Mike Goodall, Mike Morris and myself. The tournament was held at Stevens Institute of Technology at Hoboken New Jersey.
This time the story was different. Frank Thornally had developed into a very strong player, topping out at around 2400. Steve Spencer was one of the most promising young players in the USA. He played in the first US Closed Junior Championship. However, he later quit chess and became one of the top go players in the US. I played well and got a good score too, although I lost to Bruce Amos representing the University of Toronto.
The result was that we swept the field. We were so far ahead by round six of the seven round event that it was just about mathematically impossible for any other team to catch us. Frank Thornally won the individual US Intercollegiate Championship and my team with the University of California at Berkeley easily won the team title.
At the recent 2012 US Open Championship in Vancouver, Washington, at the awards ceremony I met Mike Morris for the first time since 1967. We immediately recognized each other as former team mates. I was mildly surprised when Mike Morris was given a USCF life achievement award for most importantly being on the team that won the 1967 US Intercollegiate Championship. Perhaps they should give me this award too, for being on the same team.
Another aside: It happened that during the November 1967 American Open in Los Angeles at the same time that I beat Walter Browne I was interviewed on a memorable TV Talk show, the Joe Pyne Show, a Rush Limbaugh-style TV show, for reasons related to my student club in Berkeley and unrelated to chess. My game against Browne had been pre-scheduled by Director Isaac Kashdan to be played early to accommodate that TV show.
On the TV show, I was introduced as the Captain of the UC Berkeley Chess Team. This was true, at that time.
However, the show was not broadcast until January 1968. By that time, I was no longer the Captain of the UC Team. Mike Goodall was captain as he had been the team captain when we won the 1967 US Intercollegiate Championship in December 1967.
Therefore, Mike Goodall wrote an irate letter to the Joe Pyne Show complaining about this, saying that he and not I was the captain of the team. The Joe Pyne Show turned all the “fan mail” over to me, so I got the letter. Years later, I asked Mike Goodall about this but he had forgotten that he had written the letter.
The first reported game of the Benko Gambit took place in the last round of the 1967 American Open, when Benko beat Richard Laver. This game is mistakenly reported as having been played in 1968 but I know it was played in November 1967 because I was there and I watched it being played. That was the same tournament where I beat Browne. You can see the result of the game on page 49-50 of the California Chess Reporter 1967-1971.
The game for which I am undoubtedly most famous was my win over Walter Browne in the 1967 American Open. That was reported on Page 47 of the California Chess Reporter 1967-1971. There the commentator says, “In a dramatic struggle, Brown pulled out the victory. Only an early and bizarre loss to Sam Sloan kept him off the pace of the front runners.”
How come, when Browne wins, it is a “dramatic struggle” whereas when I win it is a “bizarre loss”? I won a nice game against Browne. The game was published in Chess Life and you can find it on chessgames.com.
[Event “American Open”]
[Site “Santa Monica CA”]
[Date “1967.11.23”]
[White “Sloan,Sam”]
[Black “Browne,Walter”]
[Result “1-0”]
[ECO “B31”]
[Round “3”]
- e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 g6 4. O-O Bg7 5. c3 Nf6 6. Re1 O-O 7. d4 cxd4 8. cxd4 d5 9. e5 Ne4 10. Nc3 Nxc3 11. bxc3 Qa5 12. Bf1 Bg4 13. Qd3 Bxf3 14. gxf3 e6 15. Bh3 Rfc8 16. Be3 Qa3 17. Bf1 Na5 18. Qb5 a6 19. Qb4 Rxc3 20. Qxa3 Rxa3 21. Rec1 b5 22. Rc5 Bf8 23. Rc7 Nc4 24. Bxc4 dxc4 25. h4 Rc3 26. h5 b4 27. hxg6 hxg6 28. Kg2 a5 29. d5 Bg7 30. dxe6 fxe6 31. Rh1 Rc2 32. Rb7 Rxa2 33. Bg5 Rf8 34. Bf6 Rxf6 35. exf6 Bxf6 36. Rb8+ Kg7 37. Rb7+ Be7 38. Rxe7+ Kf6 39. Rhh7 Ke5 40. f4+ Kd6 41. Rc7 Kd5 42. Rhd7+ Ke4 43. Rxc4+ Kf5 44. Rf7+ Kg4 45. f5+ Kg5 46. fxe6 Re2 47. e7 b3 48. e8=Q Rxe8 49. Rb7 1-0
The 1962 Northern California Championship turned out to have special long range significance, because that is where Mike Goodall, Frank Thornally, Roy Hoppe and Sam Sloan all first met each other. You can see us all in the tournament together in the tournament crosstable on page 212 of the 1961-1964 volume. Now the four of us, including Mike Goodall’s ghost, are fighting a court case in 2012, exactly 50 years later.
Kerry Lawless has been working for years and years, at least 25 years that I know of and probably a lot longer than that, on compiling every game he can, published and, where possible, unpublished that has ever been played in the State of California.
The result of this great work is his website ChessDryad.com and his database calgames.pgn that contains at present 37,598 games, all played in the State of California from 1856 to the present. All of the games in California Chess Reporter here are also in his downloadable calgames.pgn database but in Algebraic Notation.
Kerry Lawless has also been making great efforts to compile all chess publications published in the State of California and, as much as possible, all articles about California chess.
One result of these efforts is he has compiled every issue of the California Chess Reporter during its 25 year run from 1951 to 1976. At great personal expense to himself he has had all these volumes bound by a professional binding service.
These bound volumes created by Kerry Lawless have been used to make these reprints.
Sadly, this volume of the California Chess Reporter contains no pictures, so we have to include pictures from other volumes. The cover photo here shows players in the 1959 California Open Championship.
