All Chess Review issues, and all Chess Life issues through 2018, released to the public

[Anonymous]

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 <***@invalid.invalid>

[The Horny Goat]

On Fri, 24 Jan 2020 11:23:14 +0100, Anonymous

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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.