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My long-time friend, Peter McSherry, Canadian author ("The Big Red Fox" and "Mean Streets") and regular columnist for Toronto Taxi News send me the following reminiscence:
On Friday, July 16, I attended visited the Harbour Castle Convention Centre to catch a bit of the 2010 Canadian Open Chess Championship.
This was a kind of nostaligic experience - and I meant it to be so.
Forty-two years ago, in July 1968, I was a competitor in the Canadian Open Chess Championship, then held in the Debates Room of the University of Toronto's Hart House.
I had learned to play chess, sort of, at 21 years, which is very late. For a year or more, I had been hanging about Toronto's Central YMCA Chess Club and, by the age of 23, I was a rated C-class player - who had played a few tournaments but had never studied anything. I wanted to get better, but I didn't know how. Chess books? I didn't know a good one from a bad one. I dabbled without knowing what it was I needed to learn.
There was then a late middle-aged man at the YMCA Club, whose name I will forget, who was very generous with his time when it came to teaching young players the game of chess.
This person was an absolute devotee of the chess theory of Aron Nimzovich and Nimzovich's book, My System, published in 1930, and first read by myself in the days immediately before the Canadian Open of 1968. The practical effect of reading this book was that, all of a sudden, I came to understand there was such a thing as positional chess - and that this was a learnable essential, and a big part of what I was missing.
One read through My System and I knew I was already then a different brand of "patzer." Right then, I made a qualitative leap. I'd guess now that I hopped from being a C-class to a B-class player in one quick read. I knew this before I played another game.
And I had a lot more confidence.
**********************************************
MILAN ZAGAR - the chess player who made me happier than any other in my years of off-again-on-again association with this fascinating game - was my first round opponent in the Canadian Open of 1968.
Or rather I was meant to be his opponent.
On previous results I'd have made myself a 50-1 underdog.
Mine That Bird!
Jimmy Braddock!
"Mr. Zagar" was then a man about forty, an experienced player who when he wasn't playing chess always seemed to be doing a crossword puzzle. He was a rated chess Expert - the category below Master - and was, in the late 1960s, a regular competitor in the annual Toronto Closed. Which is to say, for at least a few years, he was one of the 12 highest-rated players in Toronto who would answer the bell for the City's annual winter round robin championship.
I had then probably played "Mr. Zagar" about two or three dozen times in the weekly YMCA Club 5-minute blitz tournaments and I don't think I'd ever registered a point against him. I was quite certain that he regarded me as "the quintessential patzer" - with good cause.
But this first day of the 1968 Canadian Open, in a game played at a much slower time limit, for the first time, I thought I had some kind of a chance - because of Aron Nimzovich's My System and because, only by happenstance, I had recently been closely studying a game of former world champion Alexander Alekhine's. The game was a Catalan Opening - an opening system I thought I understood as well as any, and, from past experience, I was 95% certain Mr. Zagar would allow.
Which he did.
He came late to the board, answered my first few moves in an off-hand way and very soon had a badly-cramped position. Eventually, I had knights unassailably posted on c5 and d6 and that awful Catalan bishop was blasting down the long diagonal at his Queen-side. Well, it was a slaughter. Nimzovich and Alekhine beat Mr. Zagar quite badly.
I will say he was very gracious in an almost unimaginabale defeat, smiled an embarrassed smile, shook hands with the miracle patzer, ignored those among the spectators who were enjoying what had just then happened, then, afterwards, left the room quickly. I'm certain, if I were him, I would have been much less gracious. The drop from Zagar to McSherry was then a very steep vertical line.
In Round 2, I played another first round winner, Paul Bezkacsko, a player who had regularly beaten McSherry-before-Nimzovich in the YMCA 5-minute blitz, too. He was an A-class player whose tactical style made him much more susceptible to My System than Zagar was - and he, too, succumbed, rightly or by mistake, I don't remember. I have no memory of that 42-year-old game - only that I thought I played well, won with the Black pieces, and was satisfied with the result.
Now I was in deep water.
A 1600-player with a 2-0 score in a strong Swiss system tournament, I was now fed to a bigger shark. My board was now up on the small dais at the front, with those of Grandmaster Bent Larsen, and a bunch of celebrity International and Canadian Masters and only a few Experts.
And C-class me.
My opponent was Alar Puhm, an Expert who wasn't far south of Master strength, who didn't have much trouble beating me. I wriggled around as best I could before he transposed the game into a trivial won ending. Puhm, a smart young guy about 26, had Grandmaster Bent Larsen, the second strongest player outside the Soviet Union (after Bobby Fischer), staying at his Toronto home. Grandmaster Larsen came and analyzed Puhm's game with me -an analysis that taught me I didn't see much at all - and neither, as it seemed, had Puhm. Larsen would win the tournament easily.
The big story that round was what happened at the board beside ours. Dr. George Berner, a well-known eccentric who hovered around Master-class insanity for many years, was playing Paul Vaitonis, a Hamilton Master and previous winner of the Canadian Open. There was a furious time scramble that saw Vaitonis checkmate Berner just before Vaitonis's flag fell. Berner got up, clock in hand, and ran around the tournament hall shouting, "Tournament director! Tournament director!" - claiming Vaitonis's flag fell before the mate, when a half dozen neutral witnesses said it hadn't.
Berner created an incredible disturbance at a time when many games in the room were at their crisis-point.
After the director ruled him a loser, Dr. Berner treated the tournament, on every day remaining day, to an extended written argument on bristol board. The main argument was in blue, the secondary argument was in red, and there were about 6 more colors with their own lines of sub-argument each day, and 8 or 10 bristol boards each edition. All of this as to how and why Dr. George Berner was robbed of a win, to the everlasting discredit of chess in Canada. There was a week's worth of this.
I remember old Peter Avery, Toronto champion in 1936, muttering to me, "He is, of course, a brilliant man - but there is something really wrong with him."
Three years later, I watched Dr. Berner lecturing Boris Spassky, then World Chess Champion, on how to play chess - in an obscure line of the Ruy Lopez.
I finished the 1968 Canadian Open with a 50 percent score - 5 1/2-5 1/2. The Zagar game I loved - perhaps more than any other I ever played - because it first told me I could at least occasionally knock over a player who had previously seemed to be "A Giant." In the 7th round I won a nice queen and pawn ending against a player I didn't like, and in the 8th I was winning a rook and pawn ending against a player from the West named R.P. Leonard, who had just recently won the Alberta Open. I was a pawn up with winning chances, but slept through the adjournment and, so, lost the game. Computers have long since done away with adjournments in tournament chess.
*****************************************************
I fooled with chess off and on till I was 30, never getting beyond A class strength. Then in 1992, when I was 47, I studied for a year beforehand, made a 20-game comeback in the Scarborough Chess Club that ended with me having an inflated 2100 rating - Expert class. I retired again, perhaps forever. My rating was aided by a couple of wins that I didn't deserve. In one case I accepted a draw offer at an adjournment when I should have resigned. The other fellow - a Master - didn't want to play the adjournment because he was withdrawing from the tournament to get married. I took the draw, when I might have been more of a gentleman and resigned - an act I've always felt rightly guilty about.
So I'm a overrated bum, to this day.
After that short season, I retired again to my bank robbers and my taxicab!
I saw Milan Zagar at this year's Canadian Open, in which he was once again a competitor. We didn't speak, as we were never in the habit of doing so before then. I hope he won't mind that I am writing that he once helped make my day. And, I will say this. You've gotta admire a man who gets out there and competes - even up - with much younger minds at age 80 or 85.
Milan Zagar, I salute you!
On Friday, July 16, I attended visited the Harbour Castle Convention Centre to catch a bit of the 2010 Canadian Open Chess Championship.
This was a kind of nostaligic experience - and I meant it to be so.
Forty-two years ago, in July 1968, I was a competitor in the Canadian Open Chess Championship, then held in the Debates Room of the University of Toronto's Hart House.
I had learned to play chess, sort of, at 21 years, which is very late. For a year or more, I had been hanging about Toronto's Central YMCA Chess Club and, by the age of 23, I was a rated C-class player - who had played a few tournaments but had never studied anything. I wanted to get better, but I didn't know how. Chess books? I didn't know a good one from a bad one. I dabbled without knowing what it was I needed to learn.
There was then a late middle-aged man at the YMCA Club, whose name I will forget, who was very generous with his time when it came to teaching young players the game of chess.
This person was an absolute devotee of the chess theory of Aron Nimzovich and Nimzovich's book, My System, published in 1930, and first read by myself in the days immediately before the Canadian Open of 1968. The practical effect of reading this book was that, all of a sudden, I came to understand there was such a thing as positional chess - and that this was a learnable essential, and a big part of what I was missing.
One read through My System and I knew I was already then a different brand of "patzer." Right then, I made a qualitative leap. I'd guess now that I hopped from being a C-class to a B-class player in one quick read. I knew this before I played another game.
And I had a lot more confidence.
**********************************************
MILAN ZAGAR - the chess player who made me happier than any other in my years of off-again-on-again association with this fascinating game - was my first round opponent in the Canadian Open of 1968.
Or rather I was meant to be his opponent.
On previous results I'd have made myself a 50-1 underdog.
Mine That Bird!
Jimmy Braddock!
"Mr. Zagar" was then a man about forty, an experienced player who when he wasn't playing chess always seemed to be doing a crossword puzzle. He was a rated chess Expert - the category below Master - and was, in the late 1960s, a regular competitor in the annual Toronto Closed. Which is to say, for at least a few years, he was one of the 12 highest-rated players in Toronto who would answer the bell for the City's annual winter round robin championship.
I had then probably played "Mr. Zagar" about two or three dozen times in the weekly YMCA Club 5-minute blitz tournaments and I don't think I'd ever registered a point against him. I was quite certain that he regarded me as "the quintessential patzer" - with good cause.
But this first day of the 1968 Canadian Open, in a game played at a much slower time limit, for the first time, I thought I had some kind of a chance - because of Aron Nimzovich's My System and because, only by happenstance, I had recently been closely studying a game of former world champion Alexander Alekhine's. The game was a Catalan Opening - an opening system I thought I understood as well as any, and, from past experience, I was 95% certain Mr. Zagar would allow.
Which he did.
He came late to the board, answered my first few moves in an off-hand way and very soon had a badly-cramped position. Eventually, I had knights unassailably posted on c5 and d6 and that awful Catalan bishop was blasting down the long diagonal at his Queen-side. Well, it was a slaughter. Nimzovich and Alekhine beat Mr. Zagar quite badly.
I will say he was very gracious in an almost unimaginabale defeat, smiled an embarrassed smile, shook hands with the miracle patzer, ignored those among the spectators who were enjoying what had just then happened, then, afterwards, left the room quickly. I'm certain, if I were him, I would have been much less gracious. The drop from Zagar to McSherry was then a very steep vertical line.
In Round 2, I played another first round winner, Paul Bezkacsko, a player who had regularly beaten McSherry-before-Nimzovich in the YMCA 5-minute blitz, too. He was an A-class player whose tactical style made him much more susceptible to My System than Zagar was - and he, too, succumbed, rightly or by mistake, I don't remember. I have no memory of that 42-year-old game - only that I thought I played well, won with the Black pieces, and was satisfied with the result.
Now I was in deep water.
A 1600-player with a 2-0 score in a strong Swiss system tournament, I was now fed to a bigger shark. My board was now up on the small dais at the front, with those of Grandmaster Bent Larsen, and a bunch of celebrity International and Canadian Masters and only a few Experts.
And C-class me.
My opponent was Alar Puhm, an Expert who wasn't far south of Master strength, who didn't have much trouble beating me. I wriggled around as best I could before he transposed the game into a trivial won ending. Puhm, a smart young guy about 26, had Grandmaster Bent Larsen, the second strongest player outside the Soviet Union (after Bobby Fischer), staying at his Toronto home. Grandmaster Larsen came and analyzed Puhm's game with me -an analysis that taught me I didn't see much at all - and neither, as it seemed, had Puhm. Larsen would win the tournament easily.
The big story that round was what happened at the board beside ours. Dr. George Berner, a well-known eccentric who hovered around Master-class insanity for many years, was playing Paul Vaitonis, a Hamilton Master and previous winner of the Canadian Open. There was a furious time scramble that saw Vaitonis checkmate Berner just before Vaitonis's flag fell. Berner got up, clock in hand, and ran around the tournament hall shouting, "Tournament director! Tournament director!" - claiming Vaitonis's flag fell before the mate, when a half dozen neutral witnesses said it hadn't.
Berner created an incredible disturbance at a time when many games in the room were at their crisis-point.
After the director ruled him a loser, Dr. Berner treated the tournament, on every day remaining day, to an extended written argument on bristol board. The main argument was in blue, the secondary argument was in red, and there were about 6 more colors with their own lines of sub-argument each day, and 8 or 10 bristol boards each edition. All of this as to how and why Dr. George Berner was robbed of a win, to the everlasting discredit of chess in Canada. There was a week's worth of this.
I remember old Peter Avery, Toronto champion in 1936, muttering to me, "He is, of course, a brilliant man - but there is something really wrong with him."
Three years later, I watched Dr. Berner lecturing Boris Spassky, then World Chess Champion, on how to play chess - in an obscure line of the Ruy Lopez.
I finished the 1968 Canadian Open with a 50 percent score - 5 1/2-5 1/2. The Zagar game I loved - perhaps more than any other I ever played - because it first told me I could at least occasionally knock over a player who had previously seemed to be "A Giant." In the 7th round I won a nice queen and pawn ending against a player I didn't like, and in the 8th I was winning a rook and pawn ending against a player from the West named R.P. Leonard, who had just recently won the Alberta Open. I was a pawn up with winning chances, but slept through the adjournment and, so, lost the game. Computers have long since done away with adjournments in tournament chess.
*****************************************************
I fooled with chess off and on till I was 30, never getting beyond A class strength. Then in 1992, when I was 47, I studied for a year beforehand, made a 20-game comeback in the Scarborough Chess Club that ended with me having an inflated 2100 rating - Expert class. I retired again, perhaps forever. My rating was aided by a couple of wins that I didn't deserve. In one case I accepted a draw offer at an adjournment when I should have resigned. The other fellow - a Master - didn't want to play the adjournment because he was withdrawing from the tournament to get married. I took the draw, when I might have been more of a gentleman and resigned - an act I've always felt rightly guilty about.
So I'm a overrated bum, to this day.
After that short season, I retired again to my bank robbers and my taxicab!
I saw Milan Zagar at this year's Canadian Open, in which he was once again a competitor. We didn't speak, as we were never in the habit of doing so before then. I hope he won't mind that I am writing that he once helped make my day. And, I will say this. You've gotta admire a man who gets out there and competes - even up - with much younger minds at age 80 or 85.
Milan Zagar, I salute you!
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