US Championship 1975 — Oberlin

Incomplete record. This archive holds 90 of the 91 games played; 1 is missing.

The 24th US Championship doubled as the American zonal of the world championship cycle, which made second place worth nearly as much as first. Walter Browne took the title again — 8½/13, unbeaten, half a point clear of Kenneth Rogoff — and the two of them carried the United States places into the 1976 Interzonals. It was the first US Championship held after Bobby Fischer's title passed to Anatoly Karpov by default that April, and the strongest American was now the man who kept winning this event.

◇Zonal chess in a college town

The championship went to the small college town of Oberlin in northern Ohio for thirteen rounds between 7 and 26 June 1975. Because the tournament was also the American zonal, its leading finishers qualified for the following year's Interzonal tournaments, the first stage of the next world championship cycle. Browne and Rogoff took those places.

Browne did not lose a game: four wins, nine draws, and a finish half a point clear of the field. Rogoff, then an international master, ran him closest on 8/13 with a single defeat. Behind the top two the tournament bunched almost absurdly tightly — four players shared sixth place on 6½ and four more shared tenth on 5½, so that the twelve players below Rogoff finished within 2½ points of one another.

◇Vukcevich, half a point short

Third place went to Milan Vukcevich on 7½ — half a point behind Rogoff, and so half a point short of the Interzonal. He was very much a home entrant: a contemporary account describes him as the local favourite, of Mentor, Ohio, the town that would host the championship itself two years later.

Vukcevich was born in Belgrade in 1937 and had settled in Ohio after emigrating in 1963. He was a scientist by trade — an instructor at Case Western Reserve, then at General Electric, where from 1989 he served as chief scientist — and had shared the 1969 US Open with Pal Benko and Robert Byrne. He is remembered above all as a composer: the first American resident awarded the FIDE title of International Grandmaster for chess composition, and in 1998 only the second person after Sam Loyd inducted into the US Chess Hall of Fame primarily for problems.

◇Thirteen draws

Arthur Bisguier's Oberlin was a curiosity of its own. He drew all thirteen games — the only player in the field with neither a win nor a loss to his name — and finished in the four-way tie for sixth on 6½. Lubomir Kavalek came close to the same fate with eleven draws and two losses.

At the other end of the table, Benko finished last on 5, and the former champion Reshevsky shared fourth place on 7 with Robert Byrne, the highest-rated player in the event.