Arthur Bisguier

◈A boy from the Bronx

Arthur Bernard Bisguier was born in New York City on 8 October 1929 and grew up in the Bronx, in a Jewish family where the board belonged to his father. Jesse Bisguier — born Jechiel Max Bisgeier, a mathematician — taught his son the moves at four. The boy went to the Bronx High School of Science, but his real schooling was at the Bronx Empire Chess Club, where in 1944 he finished third in the club championship; as he grew stronger he was coached by the New York master Alexander Kevitz. In 1946 he came fifth in the US Open at Pittsburgh, and by the end of the decade he was reckoned one of the best players in the country, in the company of Larry Evans, George Kramer and Walter Shipman.

Then the titles came fast. He took the US Junior Championship at Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1948 on Sonneborn–Berger tiebreak from Frank Anderson of Toronto, and retained it in 1949 — the same year he won the first of seven Manhattan Chess Club championships. In 1950 he won the US Open, then crossed the Atlantic to share first at Southsea in England with the old warrior Savielly Tartakower, a result that brought him the International Master title. The Army took him from 1951 to 1953; he managed leave for two European events, played board four for the United States at the Helsinki Olympiad of 1952, and won the Vienna Christmas tournament that December with 9–2.

◈The championship year

A poor US Open in 1953 sent him into the Philadelphia candidates' tournament for the national title, and he came through it in first place. What followed was the summit of his competitive life. At New York in 1954 he won the United States Chess Championship with 10–3, a full point clear of Larry Evans, and in the same year took the second Pan-American Championship at Los Angeles. In 1956, at Oklahoma City, he added a second US Open to the national crown. FIDE made him a grandmaster in 1957 — at a moment when, as the Boston Globe later noted, there were only thirty-nine grandmasters alive in the world. In 1959 he won a third US Open.

The margins, though, were already turning cruel. At the 1957 US Open in Cleveland he finished level on points with a fourteen-year-old named Bobby Fischer, and the title went to Fischer on tiebreak. It was a small foreshadowing of the rest of Bisguier's competitive career: he returned to the US Championship again and again, and never won it a second time.

◈The boy from Brooklyn

On 7 October 1956, in the third Rosenwald Trophy tournament in New York, Bisguier sat down opposite a thirteen-year-old from Brooklyn and beat him. It was their first meeting, and it was the only game he would ever win against Bobby Fischer. In the very same tournament the boy faced Donald Byrne and produced the game the world would come to call the Game of the Century. One drawn game followed; after that Fischer beat Bisguier thirteen consecutive times, a run described as perhaps the longest unbroken winning streak between grandmasters in the history of chess. The lifetime head-to-head finished one win, one draw, thirteen losses.

The cruellest of those losses came at the 1962–63 US Championship. Bisguier and Fischer went into the final round tied for first — and had to play each other. Bisguier reached a promising position, then erred; Fischer punished the mistake spectacularly and took the game and the title with 8/11, leaving Bisguier a point back in clear second. Larry Evans, who watched most of these encounters, put the pattern with a friend's brutal honesty: Bisguier was the one grandmaster who kept getting decent positions against Fischer and kept throwing them away.

And yet there was no bitterness in him. He served as Fischer's second at several international events, and when he spoke of the man who had cost him a decade of championships he spoke only of the debt: “He changed many of our lives. I would have never become a chess professional without him.”

◈Bronx brazenness

He played the way he talked — quickly, cheerfully, without much apparatus. He rarely prepared for opponents, disliked study, preferred company to analysis, and reached for opening systems that nobody else at his level would touch. Isaac Kashdan, preparing the American team for the 1960 Olympiad, described the habit exactly: a penchant for dashing piece sacrifices offered without much concern for whether they were sound. What the Boston Globe called his Bronx brazenness was the same thing on and off the board.

That contrarian streak left one genuine mark on theory. Bisguier was the leading early champion of the Berlin Defence to the Ruy Lopez — a line grandmasters had all but abandoned when he took it up, and one that would become, half a century later, among the most respected weapons at the very top of the game. He held Anatoly Karpov to a draw with it at Caracas in 1970.

Internationally he was a persistent, dangerous visitor rather than a title contender. He played two Interzonals, Gothenburg 1955 and Stockholm 1962, and five Olympiads spanning twenty years — 82 games, +29 −18 =35, with his best showing at Leipzig in 1960, where he scored 11½/16 on board four as the United States took the team silver. At the Bled anniversary tournament of 1961 he beat Paul Keres, Miguel Najdorf and Borislav Ivkov. Of the Keres win — the scalp most players would have dined out on for life — he wrote only: “After the game I was strangely depressed at having wasted an opportunity. I wanted to beat him brilliantly.” Later came second place behind the reigning world champion Boris Spassky at San Juan in 1969, first at Lone Pine in 1973, National Opens in 1970 (jointly), 1974 and 1978, and first place in the inaugural Grand Prix of 1980.

◈The Dean

For roughly twenty years the US Chess Federation sent Bisguier out across the country — a state at a time, a day or two at a time — to play in hospitals, colleges and prisons, so that ordinary Americans could sit down opposite a grandmaster and former national champion. It was unglamorous, endless, and he loved it. “I was delighted to do it,” he said. “I was very lucky to get so much out of chess. I tried to give something back.” He wrote regularly for Chess Life, produced American Chess Masters from Morphy to Fischer with Andrew Soltis in 1974, and late in life gathered his own games into two volumes, The Art of Bisguier (2003) and The Art of Bisguier: Selected Games 1961–2003 (2008).

He never stopped competing either. He won the US Senior Open in 1989, and again in 1997 and 1998 — completing the rare sweep of a United States championship at every age level of the game. He was inducted into the US Chess Hall of Fame in 1994, and on 18 March 2005 the US Chess Federation proclaimed him Dean of American Chess. He went on playing regularly at the Metrowest Chess Club in Natick, Massachusetts until 2014, qualifying for and contesting its club championship in 2011, in his eighties, against opponents young enough to be his great-grandchildren.

The affection he generated was universal and it started early. Kenneth Harkness, writing in Chess Life in 1954, offered a description that nobody who met Bisguier in the sixty years afterwards ever contradicted: as friendly as a puppy, without an enemy in the world. At the Helsinki Olympiad of 1952, in the coldest years of the Cold War, he struck up a friendship with the Soviet grandmaster David Bronstein — a thing that was not supposed to be possible. “It is difficult to believe that during this tense political climate we became friends,” Bronstein wrote long afterwards, “and were openly talking to each other in the tournament hall.”