US Championship 1960/61 — New York

◇Twelve at the Empire Hotel

Twelve players sat down at the Empire Hotel on Broadway at 63rd Street on 18 December 1960, with Hans Kmoch and Frank Brady as chief referees and Chess Life covering the rounds. Fischer took the lead and kept it: seven wins, four draws, no defeats, and a two-point margin over Lombardy, who finished second on 7.

Raymond Weinstein was third on 6½. Behind him three players shared fourth on 6 — Arthur Bisguier, Samuel Reshevsky and James Sherwin — and four more shared eighth on 4½: Pal Benko, Hans Berliner, Robert Byrne and Anthony Saidy. Herbert Seidman finished last on 2½ without winning a game, though five of his eleven were drawn.

The archive preserves 55 of the 66 games played. The eleven pairings it cannot show are flagged on the cross table as lost to history rather than left blank, and the standings are the historical final table rather than a sum of the surviving games.

◇The Interzonal seats nobody could use

As zonal, the tournament sent its leaders on to the next Interzonal — but that Interzonal slipped from 1961 to 1962, and by the time it convened in Stockholm the American qualification had unravelled. Lombardy and Weinstein both withdrew. "Second and third place winners Bill Lombardy and Raymond Weinstein find that play will interfere with their studies, and Reshevsky has declined to play," Chess Review reported in February 1962, so the vacated seats passed down the Sonneborn order to Bisguier and Sherwin. Sherwin then discovered his job would not spare him the time either, and Benko took the place instead.

Fischer went to Stockholm and won the Interzonal outright. Weinstein never played an Interzonal at all: qualifying brought him the International Master title in 1962, and two years later severe mental illness ended his chess career for good.