A Century of Chess: Syracuse 1934
It’s hard to think of a great player who’s less beloved, and has less of a legend attached to him, than Reshevsky. In the ‘20s he was the twerp in the sailor suit, the boy prodigy terrorizing grown men in simultaneous exhibitions. Then he rematerialized in the ‘30s as a quiet serious young man and immediately took his place in the world’s elite. Syracuse was his triumphant entrance, but, even as an American, I’d never heard about the tournament before this, there’s no story attached to it as there is with every early event of Fischer’s, Pillsbury’s, or Capablanca’s. Reshevsky was simply dominant, he won six straight games to open the tournament before finishing with a slightly more modest 6/8. As throughout the rest of his career, there were very few attacks or dashing sacrifices. He played old man’s chess, a patient positional game but which would be decided in some tactical flurry. Basically, with him, everything was calculation, the methodical crunching of variations, which invariably was more accurate than that of his opponents. It helped too that at some point in the tournament his opponents seemed to lose their nerve and collapse at his approach — he beat Horowitz in 15 moves, Santasiere in 20, Denker also in 20.
The tournament was also the proper debut of Reuben Fine, Reshevsky’s long-time rival and another great player whom chess history has tended to ignore. Fine appeared with even less ceremony, a streetfighting type of player who, at 19, was able to hold his own with America's top masters.
It’s something of a surprise to realize that the peak of American chess was towards the mid-‘30s. The excitement of the Fischer era somewhat obscured that the US didn’t really have a deep bench of international-grade players. But in the mid-‘30s Reshevsky and Fine were emerging as fully-formed world beaters. Kashdan was already a charter member of the elite. Dake, fresh off his win over Alekhine at Pasadena, could hold his own internationally. And the ferment of a New York City chess scene produced a string of capable players in I.A. Horowitz and Arnold Denker.
So Syracuse is a seminal tournament, a proper debut of two all-time greats and featuring the cream of American chess at a very strong moment. But this being American chess the tournament barely registered in anybody’s consciousness and the majority of the game scores disappeared.
Sources: Reshevsky discusses the tournament in Reshevsky on Chess. Arnold Denker gives an entertaining account of what it was like to share a room with Reshevsky in The Bobby Fischer I Knew and Other Stories.
