1973 Greater Philadelphia Invitational Championship (part 7 of 7)
The seventh and final round was the only game on Sunday, so I had an entire day to prepare. I had a half point lead; a draw would clinch a tie for the title and a win, of course, made me the outright champion on my first attempt.
My opponent was the late Boris Baczynskyj. For some reason big Boris, one of the area's most popular players, never called me "Dan", always "Heisman", but you had to like him anyway
. When GM Joel Benjamin was about 11, Chess Life published a picture of him playing Boris and the caption read "400 pounds of chess master - 70 of it is Joel"!
Boris liked sharp Open Sicilian lines with White and probably would venture Fischer's 6.Bc4 if I played the popular Najdorf Defense. I had avoided playing the Najdorf in my previous game with black against Harvey Bradlow, so Boris might not be expecting it. So I prepared a complicated line that I found somewhere (apparently not MCO-10; I just checked my early bible; more likely an early Informant) where Black allows White to sacrifice a piece for a big attack. I figured that the line was OK for Black if I knew it, and offered winning chances for me.
During the opening I played my moves rather slowly even though they were familiar to me. Besides being nervous - there was a lot on the line! - I did not want Boris to know that I had studied the piece sacrifice line toward which we were heading; if he thought I was super-booked he might smell a rat and instead play something safe.
That part worked like a charm. The bad news was that as soon as I went beyond my opening preparation, I promptly made a big mistake and fell into a lost game! My only consolation was that Boris had taken one of his two hours to play the opening and I had taken a little less than half an hour. Still, I would have gladly switched positions, including clock times.
Eventually we found ourselves in a very complicated position with Boris mostly having a big advantage with my exposed king; however, he was also in a time scramble. But that's getting ahead of the story (click on the moves to see the annotations below the board):
I won! One of my biggest thrills. I had some help from my formidable opponents, but the winner of an event like this usually does. In that sense, there is definitely luck in chess and, this time, I was on the good side. Luck may not even out in the long run (at one point I lost 27 of 31 "coin tosses" in the final round and got Black! Use the binomial theorem to figure the odds against that...), but it gets close. As they say, Good players make their own luck.
After the event, I calculated that my USCF rating should rise to 2227 (in those days I believe FIDE did not rate national-only events; these days it would likely be dual-rated). But before computer-ratings, it took the USCF months to rate an event and, at the US Open the following month, the USCF adjusted the rating formula. Then, inexplicably, their statistician applied the new formula to all events not yet rated, even if they were played before the formula was changed! This ex post facto decision not only cost me my master title for a while, but made me so upset I did not play in events for about a year (you can also read about this in my book The Improving Annotator).
I just guesstimated that the $200 I won (the largest prize I ever won in a chess event, even without inflation adjustment) would be worth about 1,000 today (2013). So I googled an inflation calculator and it turned out to be $1037.30 . Plus I got a nice silver bowl which occasionally I remember to polish...
PS: I only played in one more Greater Philadelphia Invitational Championship, in 1977, one of the final invitationals of the series. That 1977 event was one of the strongest "local" events ever held (not including the national sized World Open and other large CCA events). Eventually all 8 participants from 1977 got FIDE titles: IMs Bruce Rind, Richard Costigan, and Tim Taylor, FMs Karl Dehmelt, Tom Costigan, Mike Shahade, and Boris Baczynskyj, and "only" CM for me. In 1977 I was the lowest rated player by about 200 rating points, but came in a respectable 6th of 8, again beating Boris and drawing with Rich Costigan and Karl Dehmelt.
I guess one of the reasons that the Invitational died is that the CCA began holding the World Open in Philadelphia each year, so local masters now had plenty of strong competition, whereas before we were more of an isolated pocket. I believe that Bruce Rind is the strongest player ever to be born and stay in the Philadelphia area; certainly in the past 100 years or so. Bruce has been retired for quite a while, but he was a strong IM at his peak. We've never had a home-grown GM born and stay here - yet.
This completes my 7-part series. Hope you enjoyed it and that I was able to preserve a small slice of Philadelphia chess history for posterity. Thanks again for NM Richard Pariseau for creating this event and later TD Jim Politowski for taking up the organizing after Rich no longer wished to run it.
PPS: I just found in my attic a writeup on this event by TD Politowski in an old Atlantic Chess News (Vol 1 #6). It says that David Moore finished second with 4.5-2.5, Tim Taylor was third, and Mike Pastor fourth. The average age (not including Golder, who refused to divulge) was 21! It listed the previous winners as 1969: Leroy Dubeck and Arnold Chertkof, 1970: Mike Shahade, 1971: Shahade and Dubeck, and 1972: Ross Nickel.
Previous installment links for this seven part series (one blog per round):
