Endgame of Kings and Pawns From the Museum

The following game was played in Lone Pine, California. The Louis D. Statham Masters tournaments held there from 1971-1981 were directed by Isaac Kashdan. The illustration is from the Beverly and Jim Rogers Museum of Lone Pine Film History. The stagecoach is from Rawhide. The most famous version of that movie was from 1951 and starred Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward. An earlier version starred Smith Ballew and the baseball great, Lou Gehrig, in 1938. The connection from the movies to chess is not that Tyrone Power played chess, but the site of Lone Pine in the Sierra Mountains and the word museum. The movies were made on film, but now can be viewed on DVDs played on computers. The endgame comes from my museum, notebooks which were made of paper, before chess players had notebooks that were computers. When the game was published in Chess Life, the monthly paper magazine of the United States Chess Federation, I first checked to see if the extra queenside pawn would win for White by diverting the Black king away from protecting the kingside pawns. It did, in the game due to incorrect play. The second thought was that Black, on the move, wins by pushing his kingside majority in a way that uses White's pawns to block White's king from stopping the passed pawn that results. This human, not computer, analysis was not shown in Chess Life and remained in my notes for over thirty years. The correct line, after move 40, was found by a couple of others and published in recent years. The players were international masters who finished in 15-19th places with 5/9. If White had won and scored 6/9, he would have been in places 5-7 and Black with 4/9 would have placed 29-37. Of course, since this was played in round four, they would have had different Swiss pairings. Norman Weinstein found an executive career in a big bank. Michael Rohde became a lawyer, but found time to win the brilliancy prizes in the US Championships from 1986-1988 and become a grandmaster in 1988.