AThe Boston Globe Boston, Massachusetts Tuesday, April 07, 1959
No More Long, Drawn-Out Duels: Chess Now Fast Game For Young Players
by J.A. Burgess
Youth has taken over professional chess from East to the West. The Russian champion Mikhail Tahl won his title at the age of 19 and the American champion, Bobby Fischer, became champion at the age of 14. These are extremes but the trend is definite and perhaps soon chess will be like baseball and football in which a player is “old” at 35.
The trend has been gradual but an idea of the inroads youth has made can be had by comparing two famous tournaments held in New York, the International of 1924 and the recent United States championship.
In the 1924 event, the average age of the contestants was 42 and the first prize was won by the oldest player participating—55-year-old Dr. Emanuel Lasker.
In the recent U.S. tournament the average age was 26 and the title went to the youngest player, Bobby Fischer, now 15 years old!
What is this young crop like?
In school, they excel in studies.
An exception to this rule is provided by national champion Fischer, a pupil at Erasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn, who confesses to no liking for school because “it keeps me away from chess.” He is only an average scholar. (“I'm not very good at math.”)
Beyond chess many of the boys are voracious readers of everything from Joyce, Eliot and Pasternak to the Baker Street Irregulars.
In aspirations we come to a great divide between the good-to-excellent -to- great young chessplayers and their non-playing contemporaries.
Teen-age masters aspire mostly to careers in engineering, the arts, medicine, law, government and teaching. No salesmen, no business administration majors, no airline pilots or bricklayers.
Of today's whiz kids, Fischer simply aspires to be world chess champion, a goal which, judging from his work in the past two years, he is entirely capable of achieving.
Arthur Freeman, former Boston champion, now at Harvard, is majoring in English with one eye on teaching and the other on writing.
Geddy Sveikasukas, who for years played for the Lithuanian Chess Club of South Boston, is studying government at Harvard.
David Ames of Quincy and Jim O'Keefe of Charlestown are engineering hopefuls.
Why do they play chess? Perhaps the clearest answer to this was given by O'Keefe, who said: “It's impossible to play a perfect game of chess, but every time you play you are striving for that ideal. I think what comprises the charm and appeal of chess is the mirage of possible perfection. I would say that the prime cause of chessplaying is intellectual challenge and the prime product, stimulation.”
All the players consulted believed chess honed the mind to a finer edge; all felt that chess was an aid to study. But the consensus seems to be that the desire to play must be controlled firmly at first to keep it from developing into a mania. It seems it's possible to become a chess bum as well as a tennis bum, and it's much less profitable here.
Most of the boys play in team matches as well as in tournaments. Some engage in postal chess and all of them seem to play a great deal of quick chess with clocks.
Five-minute chess is the rage right now. In this variation each player has five minutes to make all the moves in a game. Even if a player has a winning position, if he does not complete the game in the required time, he is lost. This type of chess is said to be good practice for improving quick “sight” of the board.
So chess has become a fast game for the young. And the public view of a chess contest at long last will be no longer the spectacle of two old men with nothing to do and endless time in which to do it over a chessboard.
