US Championship 1946 — New York

Samuel Reshevsky had won four of the first five US Championship tournaments before Arnold Denker took the title in 1944. In the autumn of 1946 he took it back in the most emphatic way available: 16 points from 18 games, fourteen wins and four draws, not a single loss, two and a half points clear of Isaac Kashdan. Graeme Cree's tournament page records that the 16 points are the most ever scored in US Championship play, and that Reshevsky's +14 matched Denker's 1944 mark.

◇The champion and the man who had been champion

Denker came to New York holding the title, and had reinforced his claim only months earlier by defending it in a challenge match against Herman Steiner at Los Angeles, winning 6–4. In the tournament he finished tied for fifth on 12, four points behind Reshevsky and level with I. A. Horowitz. Steiner was seventh on 11.

Reshevsky had won the championship tournaments of 1936, 1938, 1940 and 1942 and had defended the title by match against Horowitz in 1941; he supported himself as an accountant rather than as a professional player. Two years after this tournament he shared third place with Paul Keres at the world championship match-tournament in The Hague and Moscow, behind Mikhail Botvinnik and Vasily Smyslov.

◇A tournament without a bad day

Reshevsky drew his opening two games, with Anthony Santasiere and George Kramer, then won six in a row. He gave away only two more half points in the whole event — to Horowitz in round nine and to Jacob Levin in round eighteen — and in the last round he beat Kashdan, the man who finished second.

Behind him Kashdan scored 13½, Santasiere 13 and Levin 12½. Then came Denker and Horowitz on 12, Steiner on 11, and a long tail: four players tied on 6½, and Stefan Kowalski last on 3½.

◇The twentieth player

Twenty men sat down to play, but only nineteen appear in the final table. Louis J. Isaacs of Chicago played nine games, winning one — against Kowalski in round four — and losing the other eight. When he failed to appear for his tenth game he was forfeited. Cree, citing Chess Review of December 1946, records what followed: Isaacs protested, the tournament director proposed referring the question to the Tournament Committee, and Isaacs replied that he did not want to put anyone to any trouble. He did not come back, and his score was cancelled.

From round eleven onward the reduced field meant one player sat out each round. The archive still holds eight of Isaacs's nine games, even though the results themselves were struck from the record.