• All Chess Review issues, and all Chess Life issues through 2018, releas

    From Anonymous@21:1/5 to All on Fri Jan 24 11:23:14 2020
    XPost: rec.games.chess.misc, rec.games.chess.politics

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    I saw an announcement in the latest Chess Life that the USCF was
    releasing all of the issues ever printed of Chess Review (1933-
    1969) and all Chess Life issues from 1946 to 2018 on the USCF Web
    site. I went there and downloaded all of them. It's very
    interesting reading the Chess Reviews from the first decade or more
    of that publication's existence. You can read about World War II
    starting up and disrupting the International Team Tournament at
    Buenos Aires in September 1939. And you can read about the
    Americans not being able to send a team to the event because they
    couldn't raise the money for it.

    The files are here: <https://new.uschess.org/chess-life-digital-archives/> and although the Chess Life article says that they'll be hard to get due to the press of people getting them for the first few months they are in fact easy to get right now.

    I'm wallowing in old chess articles and being amused at seeing my
    name in there long ago.


    Eugene Delmar's Ghost <edg@invalid.invalid>

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  • From The Horny Goat@21:1/5 to anonymous@hoi-polloi.org on Sun Jan 26 11:12:46 2020
    XPost: rec.games.chess.misc, rec.games.chess.politics

    On Fri, 24 Jan 2020 11:23:14 +0100, Anonymous
    <anonymous@hoi-polloi.org> wrote:

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    I saw an announcement in the latest Chess Life that the USCF was
    releasing all of the issues ever printed of Chess Review (1933-
    1969) and all Chess Life issues from 1946 to 2018 on the USCF Web
    site. I went there and downloaded all of them. It's very
    interesting reading the Chess Reviews from the first decade or more
    of that publication's existence. You can read about World War II
    starting up and disrupting the International Team Tournament at
    Buenos Aires in September 1939. And you can read about the
    Americans not being able to send a team to the event because they
    couldn't raise the money for it.

    The USCF wasn't the only federation operating on a shoe string in
    those days. The ONLY reason Abe Yanofsky was able to play at Groningen
    1946 (where he only scored 8.5/19 BUT beat Botvinnik) was that he was
    in uniform in France when he heard about the event and as the
    currently reigning Canadian champion (there was a grand total of 1
    championship during the war and Abe won it) had contacted the
    organizers who told him that if he was able to get confirmation from
    the Chess Federation of Canada that he was their official rep they
    would give him an invitation to play.

    The total cost to the CFC of Yanofsky's participation was the cost of
    the return telegram which was good since that was about all they could
    afford at the time. Yanofsky had to buy his own train ticket from
    Paris to Groningen (the CFC could never have sent him had he been
    demobilized and sent back to Canada 3 months earlier) and his date
    with history. (He said he was not the only master in military service
    at that tournament but didn't say who else)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_1946_chess_tournament

    For what it's worth that single win changed Yanofsky's life - after
    his military discharge he attended law school on the Canadian version
    of the GI bill and while he was establishing his legal career he (like
    every other newly graduated lawyer) needed clients and Yanofsky told
    how the late Joe Dremen (who kind of played the Canadian role of Col.
    Edmondson in the US in the immediate postwar era) contacted many of
    the movers and shakers in the Winnipeg business community saying "you
    want a smart lawyer? This young man beat the best the Russian's have
    at chess! How much smarter can you get than that?)

    [I heard this story direct from Yanofsky when he was trying to
    convince an up and coming junior phenom - 2350 at age 16 - to stay in
    school rather than dropping out to play chess full time. Yanofsky's
    point was that he had done financially much better from chess than
    Fischer - who was the phenom's idol - had ever done which was true as
    it launched his career as one of Manitoba's top lawyers and later
    mayor of his home town]

    Thank you for sharing the information about the USCF archive.

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