WHITE"Whence came the United States Open Championship Tournament?" is the question from a Cedar City player.
The U.S. Open is the longest-running annual tournament and traces its lineage to the first Western Championship in 1900. It was held in Excelsior, Minn. The Western Chess Association conducted the tournaments from 1900 to 1934.These tournaments provided virtually the only arena for rising American players outside the New York chess clubs.
The list of participants is an honor roll of American chess - Samuel Reshevsky, Reubin Fine, Isaac Kashdan, Edward Lasker.
There were problems, to be sure - the Tulsa tournament of 1931 neglected such minor matters as paying the prize fund - but on the whole, the Western Championships were the closest thing to the national title event since the Paul Morphy era.
In 1934, the Western Chess Association became the American Chess Federation, claiming to represent the entire nation. Unfortunately, so did the National Chess Federation, which, on the retirement of Frank Marshall, organized an invitational U.S. Championship in 1936.
Clearly since such a situation was intolerable, and after five years of negotiation, the two organizations united in 1939 to form the United States Chess Federation (USCF), committed to holding the tournaments of both predecessors. The Western Championships, after an interim as the North American Championships, emerged in 1940 as the U.S. Open, which has been held every year since.
The 1950s saw the emergence of the "Swiss System," under the guidance of George Koltanowski who is still very active in chess nationally from San Francisco. Earlier events had been held under the "Holland System," with preliminary and final round-robins.
Notable winners of this era included Bobby Fischer, who won the Cleveland tournament in 1957 at the age of 13, and Pal Benko, who holds the record with eight U.S. Open titles.
With the growth of chess in the 1980s, the U.S. Opens grew larger and larger. The record remains at 843, set at Pasadena in 1983. The prize lists have also grown; there was a five-way tie at Palo Alto in 1981. This has not been matched since.
The tournament has traveled to the four corners of the nation - Boston, Florida, Texas, Portland.
Since 1990, the U.S. Invitational Championship for a dozen or more of the highest-ranking players and the U.S. Open have been held at the same time and the same place, adding new luster to both events. They were held in Los Angeles this year from July 27 to Aug. 8.
This year marked the 92nd U.S. Open, and 636 players vied for the crown. It was also the 37th U.S. Invitational Tournament. Sixteen grandmasters (10 of whom were born in the Soviet Union) played for the esteemed title.
Concerning the recent national championships, Larry Evans, a grandmaster and former U.S. Open champion, has written:
"Another hot race took place in the political arena for a seat on the USCF Policy Board. Archaic bylaws enable only 350 insiders to vote instead of all the 57,000 dues-paying USCF players, but the obvious reform of one member, one vote has been stymied year after year by a small clique fearful of losing control.
"Jerome Hanken won by 10 votes over David Mehler until it was discovered that about 80 ballots had vanished. To resolve the mystery, a committee of four was appointed with a representative from each side and two `neutrals' - both of whom had publicly endorsed Hanken in the bitter election campaign.
"The committee located 49 envelopes on a back shelf at the post office, and a final tally gave it to Hanken by 167-151.
" `I now tend not to believe that the ballots were tampered with,' former `Chess Life' editor Larry Parr said. `But clearly a close Hanken ally ought not to have solo access to that post office box for weeks before the ballots were actually opened.' "
Soviet world champion Gary Kasparov was the keynote speaker at the annual awards banquet. He expressed hope that chess would become part of our school curriculum and that his 1993 title match would be held in Los Angeles with other than Anatoly Karpov, whom he has already faced five times.
In the Open, Armenia's Vladimir Akopian shared first at 10-2 with Michael Rohde of New Jersey.
In a playoff for the "closed" title, Gata Kamsky, 17, who defected with his father from the Soviet Union in 1989, defeated Joel Benjamin, 27, by 21/2-11/2.
- CONGRATULATIONS TO THE SOLVERS! - Hal Harmon, Roland Brimley, Kelly Bryson, Craig Bryson, Kim Barney, O. Kent Berg, Barney Christiansen, Corey Christiansen, Justin Christiansen, Jack Crandall, George L. Cavanaugh, William DeVroom, Ken Frost, Gordon W. Greene, Peter Gafner, Brian Harrow, Alex Hart, Alison Hermance, Stanley Hunt, Monroe Iversen, Raeburn Kennard, Stephen Kennard, Nathan Kennard, David D. Kirk, Hal Knight, Kay Lundstrom, Alex Markec, Roger Neumann, Gary Neumann, Elsa L. Oldroyd, A.R. Peabody, Ted Pathakis, Knute Petersen, Ben J. Peterson, Jim Reed, Daniel Ricks, Elizabeth Ricks, Edwin O. Smith, Vern Smith, Richard Schow, Allan Schow, Gottfried Steuri, Ardean Watts, Garry B. Wilmore and Eugene Wagstaff.