{"id":188,"date":"2008-05-10T19:36:45","date_gmt":"2008-05-11T03:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=188"},"modified":"2008-05-10T20:20:01","modified_gmt":"2008-05-11T04:20:01","slug":"chess-memories-1980s-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=188","title":{"rendered":"Chess memories (1980s edition)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I will continue the ambling through my chess past that I began with this entry <\/a>about the Richmond (VA)\u00c2\u00a0chess club in the 1970s and that entry <\/a>about the U.S. Junior Open in 1974. But first, let me mention, for anyone who likes this kind of stuff, you should also definitely check out Mark Ginsburg’s blog, A Personal Chess History<\/a>. He has tons of entertaining stories (and lots of hilarious photographs!) about well-known chess personalities and events from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Unlike me,\u00c2\u00a0Ginsburg knows everybody who is\u00c2\u00a0anybody in the\u00c2\u00a0U.S. chess scene.<\/p>\n

It turns out that he was also at the U.S. Junior Open in 1974, and mentions it briefly in two entries, here<\/a> and here<\/a>. For all I know, we even played Frisbee together. Like me, he writes about what Yasser Seirawan\u00c2\u00a0was like back then, and adds some other\u00c2\u00a0minor details that I had no memory of, such as who won the tournament!<\/p>\n

But let’s move on to another place and era in my life: the 1980s, and North Carolina. In 1983, I staggered to the finish of my graduate studies at Princeton University. They somehow let me out of New Jersey with a paper saying that I had a Ph.D.,\u00c2\u00a0and I\u00c2\u00a0got my first teaching job at Duke University<\/a>, in\u00c2\u00a0Durham.<\/p>\n

Duke had some very strong players in the mid-1980s, but the real center of chess in the Triangle (this refers to three cities — Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill — that are\u00c2\u00a0separated by only a few miles) was Raleigh. The Raleigh chess club met every Friday night, at a recreation center\u00c2\u00a0in Kiwanis Park<\/a>. I’m\u00c2\u00a0glad to see that the club is still going, and still in the same place!\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Raleigh was also where we had the monthly “Phi Kappa Blanca” tournaments, which were organized by\u00c2\u00a0Robert Singletary. This may have been the longest-running series of tournaments anywhere in the United States: they went all the way up to Phi Kappa Blanca CIX (that’s 109, for\u00c2\u00a0people who don’t do Roman numerals) before they ended in 2002. They began in 1983, inspired by the “Phi Slamma Jamma” nickname of the University of Houston basketball team that year.\u00c2\u00a0I don’t know why they ended, but I can only guess that Robert got too busy directing tournaments at the national level, and didn’t have time for these local tournaments any more. (I would welcome more information from anyone who knows.)<\/p>\n

With his red hair and freckles, Robert was easy to spot in a crowd, but\u00c2\u00a0as a person he was very selfless,\u00c2\u00a0calm and reasonable,\u00c2\u00a0and did not draw attention to himself. That made him a perfect tournament director and organizer. He was certainly a unique figure in North Carolina chess, and maybe even national chess. Young chess-playing prodigies are a dime a dozen, but can you name anyone else who was a tournament-directing prodigy? I didn’t think so. Although he was a player of modest ability (perhaps 1600-strength), he\u00c2\u00a0had a greater impact on North Carolina chess than any master.\u00c2\u00a0I don’t know anyone who ever had a bad thing to say about him.<\/p>\n

The mainstays of the Raleigh chess club at that time were a strong group of experts. They were great competition for me, because I was an expert, too. Bernie Schmidt, an English teacher, was perhaps the most colorful of them, the sort of person who was willing to talk about anything — not just chess. He had a hard-fighting chess style; I would compare him to Lasker or Korchnoi\u00c2\u00a0in the sense that he didn’t necessarily have the best theoretical knowledge, but in any position he would find the moves that would make it a hard battle. He never managed to get his rating to master level, but you always knew when you played him that it would be a good game.<\/p>\n

The strongest player in the\u00c2\u00a0club (although he didn’t come very often) was Greg Samsa, a 2300-ish player who probably could have been a lot better. Style-wise, I would compare him to Capablanca; he had a very smooth and effortless approach to chess. One time I asked him how he could play so fast, and he said, “Chess is a very simple game. There’s just not that much to think about.” Unfortunately, Greg almost never played in tournaments outside the Triangle area; he said that his wife kept him on a short leash.<\/p>\n

Greg had a subtle but barbed sense of humor, which expressed itself most in the nicknames he gave to people. Steve Tarin, another master, was “The Macrodont” because of his large teeth. Jack Berry was “Jack the Expert.” I don’t know why this nickname was so peculiarly appropriate for Jack, but it was. It somehow captured Jack’s vanity, and the fact that he lusted after being a master but\u00c2\u00a0seemed condemned to eternal life as an expert. (Actually, Jack did eventually make it to 2200 for a while, after I left North Carolina, but I don’t know if he ever shed the nickname “Jack the Expert.”)<\/p>\n

The other most appropriate nickname was Alan Patrick’s.\u00c2\u00a0Everyone called him “Alpo,” a name he must have hated, but it fit him perfectly. First, it was such a nice, easy contraction of his name. And second, he was kind of chubby and beefy. Just like, well, a can of Alpo dog food. Sorry! But actually, Alpo was a great, easy-going\u00c2\u00a0guy. He eventually made it to master,\u00c2\u00a0just barely:\u00c2\u00a0His peak rating was 2203, and he only stayed above 2200 for one tournament! Still, that’s good enough to get a certificate. Alan was also a state co-champion <\/a>in 2003.<\/p>\n

Probably the player I liked best, both personality-wise and also because our chess styles were quite similar, was Robin Cunningham. He graduated from high school in Raleigh and went to the University of North Carolina. I kept in touch with him for a long time after both of us left North Carolina. For a while he worked for the Educational Testing Service, and then he became an actuary. He has written a textbook on actuarial science<\/a>, so he is a published author, too!<\/p>\n

Robin now lives in California, not too far from me. His peak rating was 2432, but he is now retired from tournament chess, having succumbed to the lure of poker instead. However, I did manage to drag him out of retirement in 2006. I was forming a team for the (short-lived) Bay Area Chess League, called “Eight is Enough,” which aside from Robin consisted entirely of Santa Cruz players. We didn’t have anyone in Santa Cruz who was really good enough to compete on first board, so\u00c2\u00a0I asked Robin\u00c2\u00a0if he could\u00c2\u00a0be our ringer.\u00c2\u00a0Actually, given his long absence from chess, he felt more like a sacrificial victim — he said that his main role would be to keep the first-board chair warm while the other three people on the team won the match. He played three games for us,\u00c2\u00a0losing one and\u00c2\u00a0drawing two,\u00c2\u00a0but one of those two draws was the biggest game of the whole season. In the championship playoff, we had to win because the other team was ahead of us on tiebreaks. We got ahead 2-1, but Robin was in a life-and-death struggle on board one. I thought he was going to lose, but in a pawn-down\u00c2\u00a0minor-piece endgame he pulled out a miraculous save. Thanks to that game we won the match, 2.5-1.5, and took the league title. He said, “I was never so glad to draw a game in my life!”<\/p>\n

Incidentally, Robin had a history with team tournaments. If you look at Mark Ginsburg’s list of winners of the U.S. Amateur Team Championship — East<\/a>, you’ll see the team “Walk Your Dog” listed for 1987. Even though Duke and UNC are archrivals in sports, this team\u00c2\u00a0was a joint Duke — UNC effort. The two top boards, Michael Feinstein and Bill Mason, were students at Duke, and the third board, Robin, was at UNC. I have to admit that I don’t know where the fourth board, David Greenstein, came from.<\/p>\n

Unlike many USATE winners,\u00c2\u00a0“Walk Your\u00c2\u00a0Dog”\u00c2\u00a0was a balanced team; everybody’s ratings were between 2000 and 2400. There was a big controversy this year\u00c2\u00a0when a “stacked” team subverted the rules by fielding three grandmasters and a five-year-old whose rating was 100-something. (Elizabeth Vicary’s\u00c2\u00a0blog entry <\/a>just barely mentioned this issue, but drew 189 comments (!), some of them quite impassioned.)\u00c2\u00a0Well, there were stacked teams back in 1987, too, and “Walk Your Dog” took particular pleasure in beating all of them. A second “Walk Your Dog” team, still with Feinstein and Mason on the top two boards (although by this time both had graduated from Duke), won the USATE in 1990.<\/p>\n

Michael Feinstein, by the way, remains very active in chess, coaching\u00c2\u00a0one of the nation’s best scholastic chess teams in Austin, Texas. Elizabeth Vicary mentions him in this blog entry<\/a>, where she says that he was her first chess teacher! That would have been when Michael was a student at Duke, and Elizabeth was still in high school.<\/p>\n

I went to\u00c2\u00a0the World Open one time\u00c2\u00a0with Michael, and I can report that he had one interesting superstition. He had a pair of rather ugly green pants that were his “lucky pants,” and which he wore on the last day of any big tournament. I wonder if he still has them? Does he wear them when his chess team has a big match? Inquiring minds want to know.<\/p>\n

Speaking of Elizabeth, she was also a product of the Triangle chess scene. I’m very proud of her. I would never have guessed that she would become so well known nationally, would write great articles for U.S. Chess Online, would have one of the most popular chess blogs, would coach prize-winning chess teams from Brooklyn and would be profiled at length in\u00c2\u00a0a book, Michael Weinreb’s The Kings of New York<\/a>. Back in the 1980s, she was just a goofy but extremely smart high-school girl. One year I taught her in a math class at Duke’s Talent Identification Program<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0(TIP), a summer program for gifted and talented students. I guess I should have known she would go on to do great things, because even in a class full of overachievers, she overachieved the most. I had to make up extra assignments in the last week for her and one or two other kids, because they had finished the syllabus.\u00c2\u00a0It was\u00c2\u00a0the first time I had ever\u00c2\u00a0needed to do that in my TIP course.<\/p>\n

The only dirt I can dish on Elizabeth is that she wasn’t always the pencil-thin person you see in the photographs today. As a teenager she still had\u00c2\u00a0normal amounts\u00c2\u00a0of what some people might call “baby fat.” I can only\u00c2\u00a0speculate that at some point the Body Image Police got inside her head. Perhaps this is part of what she calls in her blog “the surpassing weirdness of being a female in our society.” Anyway, this is a small matter; if she is happy with her appearance now, that is her business — but I think she looked fine before, too.<\/p>\n

Now that I’ve gotten a chance to write about the people I knew in North Carolina chess, what they would say about me? Actually, to start with, some of them wouldn’t know who “Dana Mackenzie” is. I changed my name in 1989, when I got married, and my wife and I moved to Ohio just three months later. So some of the people in North Carolina probably never even found out about the name change, and no one really had time to get used to it. (Previously my name was Dana Nance. As an amusing aside, the official\u00c2\u00a0list of North Carolina chess champions <\/a>until this year listed the 1985 and 1987 champion as “Dana Vance”! I like anonymity, but that’s really taking it too far…)<\/p>\n

When I won my first state championship, the Durham Morning Herald <\/a>ran a short article about it. The reporter interviewed Leland Fuerstman, the tournament director, who told her that I was very “affable.” So the headline of the article read, “Affable Chess Champ Calls Game ‘A Work of Art’.” I don’t think that anyone noticed this article besides me and Robert Singletary,\u00c2\u00a0but forever after that\u00c2\u00a0Robert called me “Mr. Affable.” Oh well, I can think of worse ways to be remembered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I will continue the ambling through my chess past that I began with this entry about the Richmond (VA)\u00c2\u00a0chess club in the 1970s and that entry about the U.S. Junior Open in 1974. But first, let me mention, for anyone who likes this kind of stuff, you should also definitely check out Mark Ginsburg’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,25,12],"tags":[366,362,361,358,365,360,363,364,359],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chess-clubs","category-people","category-tournaments","tag-affable","tag-chapel-hill","tag-durham","tag-north-carolina","tag-overachiever","tag-raleigh","tag-stacked","tag-superstition","tag-triangle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}