US Championship Match 1897: Pillsbury – Showalter

◈A prize fight for $2,000

Showalter and Pillsbury played three nights a week — Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. — at the Hamilton Chess Club in Brooklyn, under time controls of 30 moves an hour for the first two hours and 15 moves an hour afterward. The stipulations were built for a real fight: seven wins would end it outright, but a 6–6 tie extended the contest to whoever reached ten wins first, with a 9–9 score to be declared a drawn match.

It very nearly went the distance the hard way. Showalter, the defending champion, fought Pillsbury close to parity deep into the match, and the Brooklyn club later presented him with a $100 bicycle in recognition of the fight he put up in defeat. But Pillsbury closed it out, winning ten games to Showalter's eight against three draws — 11½–9½ on the final score.

◈"I am not in search of any title but one"

Before a move was played, Pillsbury had made his intentions public: he was not seeking the US title, only a shot at Lasker's World Championship, and win or lose he would leave the American crown with Showalter. He held to it afterward, telling the press, "I do not claim to be champion of anything. Whatever position is fairly awarded to me by others I will stand upon." Showalter, backed by public opinion and much of the press, kept the title he had just lost over the board — a genuinely unusual outcome for a national championship match, and one that only Pillsbury's own stated principle explains.

◈Settled for good in 1898

The arrangement did not last. The two men met again the following year, and this time Pillsbury won far more decisively, +7 −3 =2, and accepted the championship he had turned down in 1897. He held the US title until his death from complications of syphilis in 1906, at 33 — the same illness that had already begun to erode the brilliant form that carried him past Lasker himself at Hastings in 1895.