US Championship 1977 — Mentor

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

Walter Browne won the 25th US Championship at Mentor, Ohio with 9/13, half a point ahead of Robert Byrne — and the half point was the game the two of them played in the very first round. Byrne never lost again. It was Browne's third US title in succession, the championship having skipped 1976 altogether, and no American had put three consecutive titles together since Bobby Fischer.

◇Round one settles it

Browne had White against Robert Byrne on the opening day and won. Across the remaining twelve rounds Byrne put together five wins and seven draws without a single further defeat, finished on 8½ — and was still half a point short. It is as clean an example as the championship offers of a title decided by one result on the first afternoon.

Browne's own run was not flawless. James Tarjan beat him in round six, the champion's only loss of the tournament. He answered it by taking 3 points from his last four games to finish alone on 9. Byrne, Anatoly Lein and Bernard Zuckerman each lost exactly one game in the whole event; only Browne finished ahead of all of them.

◇A changed American field

The Mentor field showed how quickly the top of American chess was being reshaped by emigration. Anatoly Lein — a Leningrader, a grandmaster since 1968, who had come to the United States in 1976 and immediately shared first at the US Open and the World Open — took equal fifth on 7 in only his second year in the country. Leonid Shamkovich, a grandmaster since 1965 who had left the Soviet Union in 1975 and travelled by way of Israel and Canada, finished on 5½.

The youngest men in the field pointed the other way, to the 1980s. Larry Christiansen, who would take a share of the US title three years later at Greenville, placed eighth on 6. John Fedorowicz, co-winner of that year's US Junior Championship with Kenneth W. Regan, turned nineteen during the tournament; he finished last on 4½ and won the US Junior outright the following year.

◇Reshevsky, forty-one years on

Samuel Reshevsky shared third place on 7½ with John Grefe. He had won the very first tournament US Championship in 1936; Mentor was the twenty-fifth of the series, and he was still on the podium, ahead of Lein, Zuckerman, Tarjan and Christiansen.

Unlike Oberlin two years earlier, Mentor carried no zonal qualification; it was a national title and nothing more. Browne would win two more, sharing the 1980 championship and taking the 1981 title at South Bend.