US Championship 1980 — Greenville

◇Thirteen names in the table

Fourteen players were invited to Greenville. Mark Diesen took a bad fall after the third round and, after treatment at the Greenville hospital, was forced to withdraw; because he had not completed half his schedule his results were annulled, which is why the final cross table carries thirteen names and twelve games apiece rather than fourteen and thirteen.

The tournament was directed by Tim Redman, then a vice-president of the United States Chess Federation, who also wrote the introduction to the tournament book Larry Christiansen produced afterwards for Chess Enterprises.

◇Two generations at one table

The contemporary account of the event framed it as a meeting of two American chess generations: Arthur Bisguier, Robert Byrne and Larry Evans, whose reputations were made in the 1940s and 1950s, against the players who came up in the wake of the Fischer boom — Browne, Christiansen and the twenty-year-old Yasser Seirawan. The old guard held its own. The field also included three recent émigrés from the Soviet Union who had declared their intention of settling in the United States.

Evans was forty-eight and had first won the championship in 1951; his three-way share of the 1980 title was the fifth and last of his career, and he did not contest the world-championship cycle again, turning instead to chess journalism and to the support of Bobby Fischer. Browne took his fourth US title, Christiansen his first — he would win again in 1983 and 2002.

◇The chasing pack

Leonid Shamkovich and Seirawan finished just behind the leaders on 7. Anatoly Lein and Vitaly Zaltsman followed on 6, and Arthur Bisguier — who did not win a game but drew nine — brought up the rear on 4½. Nobody in the field went through the event unbeaten.