Birmingham International Tournament, 1937
Incomplete record. This archive holds 13 of the 54 games played; 41 are missing. Forty-one played pair scores are missing from this thirteen-score collection; the one Reynolds–Prins default is excluded. Three represented games survive only as position fragments. The Blow–Reynolds fragment also has a disclosed player-name conflict.
Erich Eliskases and Lodewijk Prins shared first place with 8½ points in Birmingham’s 11-player international. William Winter finished third on 7, ahead of George Koltanowski on 6½.
An international after Hastings
The Birmingham and District Chess League invited four foreign masters already in England, British champion William Winter and six Birmingham amateurs. W. Ritson Morry both played and directed the tournament in the Cobden Hotel’s board room. The concurrent Warwickshire boys competition was a separate event.
The contemporary report gives eleven rounds with one bye per player. Its round-six entry says Reynolds was absent against Prins; the result table marks this as a default. The historical census therefore comprises 54 played pairings and one awarded result. No title playoff or additional adult stage is identified.
Published final totals
Eliskases and Prins 8½ each; Winter 7; Koltanowski 6½; Morry and Silverman 5 each; Blow 4½; Reynolds 4; Znosko-Borovsky 3½; Wood 1½; Aldis 1. Prins’s total includes the default point against Reynolds. These are the historical official totals, not points computed from the surviving scores.
The original Wiener Schach-Zeitung report and the 17 March Polska Zachodnia report independently reproduce all eleven totals. The full matrix and round reports are available in BritBase’s transcription of BCM February 1937, pp. 81–86; those original BCM page images were not obtained.
Preserved fragments and conflicting identities
Thirteen surviving scores represent thirteen played pairings; forty-one played pair scores are absent after searches of both approved archives. Three records begin from supplied positions: Blow–Reynolds preserves four plies, Winter–Wood and Morry–Prins two each. Their recorded positions and moves are retained exactly, with the opening unrecorded.
The preserved Blow–Reynolds record says 1–0. BritBase gives the identical position and four moves as Reynolds–Blow 1–0 and explicitly says the MegaDatabase names were reversed; its reproduced contemporary round report and matrix also give Reynolds the win. The original CHESS diagram was not located, so the recorded names and result remain unchanged here. This conflict is visible and no computed grid is shown.
An external Znosko-Borovsky–Silverman version continues four plies beyond the preserved 52-ply endpoint; its cited original newspaper score was not obtained. Koltanowski–Silverman has a different early move order in the external transcription. No outside moves have replaced or extended either preserved score.
Original dates and rounds remain source metadata. Prins–Winter retains 18 January, round 10, while the external transcription gives 19 January. Ten scores retain an unknown day and round; these have not been filled from inference.
Result
Official totals are reported below. A computed grid is suppressed because thirteen source scores do not reconstruct the event and one preserved fragment reverses the names given by the published result. Prins’s 8½ includes one default point against the absent Reynolds.