US Championship 1969 — New York

The 20th US Championship was also the American zonal for the 1972 world championship cycle: its top three finishers would go on to the Interzonal. Bobby Fischer refused to play and, as he knew perfectly well, gave up the cycle with it. Four days past his fifty-eighth birthday, Samuel Reshevsky won the tournament unbeaten on 8/11 — his seventh national title, and his first since 1946. Then the third-place finisher handed his Interzonal seat to Fischer anyway.

◇Eleven rounds, and Fischer's refusal

The USCF invited Fischer on 24 October 1969, offering a single round robin among the top twelve masters and a prize fund at what Ed Edmondson called a record high of $6,500. Fischer answered five days later with an open letter, copies sent to the major news outlets. He would not play. The championship should run twenty-two rounds, as in the Soviet Union, Hungary and Romania, rather than eleven; the short format, he wrote, was an affront to any professional chess player. He set out the cost of his own position with complete clarity: by staying away he would lose his chance at the 1972 world championship and would have to wait until 1975.

Almost everyone told him to play anyway. Edmondson answered that the players themselves had voted 10–1 against a twenty-two-round championship before the 1966–67 event, that most of them held full-time jobs, and that doubling the tournament would roughly double its $17,000 cost. Isaac Kashdan said the same in his Los Angeles Times column. So did Saul Rubin, a former president of the Marshall Chess Club and one of Fischer's staunchest public defenders. Fischer went silent and stayed home.

◇The old champion

Reshevsky, who had first won the American championship in 1936, went through the eleven rounds without a loss: five wins, six draws, 8 points, a clear half point ahead. It was the first US title he had held in twenty-three years.

Second came William Addison on 7½ — the best result of a quiet career. An International Master who had run the Mechanics' Institute Chess Club in San Francisco from 1965 to 1969, he beat Lombardy in the last round to secure the place. Benko was third on 7 and Lombardy fourth on 6; Donald Byrne, Larry Evans, Edmar Mednis and Bernard Zuckerman all finished on 5½, and Karl Burger was last on 2. Zuckerman's tournament was a curiosity of its own — nine draws in eleven games, of which, Graeme Cree's championship history notes, only two ran past twenty moves.

“I want very much to play in the U.S. Championship this year — but not in a tournament where if a player has a bad start and loses a game or two at the beginning, he is practically eliminated from first place.”

“The idea for me to step down and give Fischer my place was my own; it was made voluntarily and without pressure from anyone.”

◇Benko's seat

Reshevsky, Addison and Benko qualified for the 1970 Interzonal at Palma de Mallorca. Benko then stepped down in Fischer's favour. He later took some trouble to correct the story that he had been bought off: the $2,000 sometimes quoted was his fee for working as second to Reshevsky and Addison at Palma, the same sum he would have drawn as an appearance fee had he played. The one condition he attached was that Fischer promise not to withdraw from the Interzonal or from the matches that followed — and Fischer kept it.

Fischer won Palma with 18½, swept Mark Taimanov and Bent Larsen 6–0 in the 1971 Candidates matches, beat Tigran Petrosian in the final, and on 11 July 1972 sat down opposite Boris Spassky in Reykjavik. Of the three men who had actually qualified, Addison finished 18th at Palma.