US Championship 1972 — New York

◇Nine points, three ways

Byrne and Kavalek arrived at the top by the same route and with the same score sheet: thirteen rounds, five wins, eight draws, not a single loss between them. Reshevsky, who was sixty, went the other way entirely — seven wins, more than anyone else in the field, and two losses. Both of those losses were to the men he ended up tied with: Kavalek beat him in round seven, Byrne in round nine. Byrne and Kavalek drew their own game in round eleven, and the three of them finished level.

Larry Evans was fourth on 8½ and Pal Benko fifth on 8, unbeaten with ten draws. Greg DeFotis, the second-lowest-rated player in the field, shared sixth on 7½ with William Lombardy. Paul Brandts, himself a competitor in the 1954 championship, directed.

◇Two seats instead of three

In 1969 the American zone had sent three players to the Interzonal. At the 1971 FIDE Congress in Vancouver a redistribution removed one Interzonal seat from every zone that had more than one, leaving the United States with two — which is why a tie for a national title could not simply be shared out. The three leaders played a double round robin in Chicago in February 1973. Byrne beat Kavalek once and drew once, then beat Reshevsky once and drew once, for 3–1. Reshevsky beat Kavalek once and drew once and finished on 2. Kavalek, with two draws, finished on 1.

The two seats went to the top two: Byrne to the Leningrad Interzonal, Reshevsky to Petropolis. Byrne did not defend his title in 1973 because he was in Leningrad, where he finished third — becoming, after Reshevsky, Fischer and Benko, only the fourth American to qualify for a Candidates Tournament. In 1974 he lost his Candidates quarter-final to Boris Spassky by 1½–4½ at San Juan.

◇The field

This was the first US Championship Kavalek could play: there had been no championship in 1970 or 1971. He had been abroad at the Rubinstein Memorial in Poland when Soviet tanks entered Prague in August 1968, and rather than return to Czechoslovakia he defected, reached Amsterdam on a student visa, and emigrated to the United States in 1970. He would go on to share the 1973 title with John Grefe and win outright at Pasadena in 1978.

At the other end of the table, I. A. Horowitz finished thirteenth on 2½. He had owned and edited Chess Review from 1933 and had been playing in American championships since the 1930s. It was his last: he died on 18 January 1973, a month before the play-off that settled this title.

◇The games

Ninety-seven games survive here: all ninety-one of the thirteen-round championship, plus all six games of the February 1973 play-off in Chicago. The standings are those of the round robin itself — the play-off decided only which of the three co-leaders would be called champion, and which two would travel to the Interzonals.