The Year Was 1956 and Rooks in Jail.

Hi - who is this appearing on the cover of the January 1957 Chess Review?

(Wait….This piece is called 1956 not 1957 …..Russ)

In Dec 1956 Bobby Fischer appeared on the cover of Chess Review.


In that issue they printed the ‘Game of The Century.’ I was looking in the Jan 1957 issue
to see if anyone mentioned the game and I came across another game which one day
may be called ‘The Game of the Century.’ Thank You. Now I will have to start all over again.


Hi - who is this appearing on the cover of the January 1957 Chess Review?


This is the issue directly after Hans Kmoch (BTW a clue to above picture) noted up the
D. Byrne - R. Fischer game calling it the ‘Game of the Century’. In this January 1957 issue
of Chess Review they mention another game played in 1956, the first ever game of chess
where a computer is playing itself. OK it was not really a proper game of Chess.

The computer in question was called Maniac I, here is a picture.



And here is another with a human dolly bird to give you an idea of it’s size.



They cut down the size of the board and the pieces (No Bishops) else it
would have taken the machine an hour to move. So here is the full game
played on a 6 x 6 board with the machine making a move every 10 minutes.

Manic 1 v Maniac 1 USA 1956

Mate in one threats, pseudo sacrifices and the first computer Zugzwang.

Famous Chess players from the past No. 34.

Daniel Harrwitz (1823-84)

Quite a decent chess player, infact a very good chess player. A bit erratic in
his behavior but harmless and on the whole he sounds like a good chap.

Remember in ’72 when Fischer was one nil down and defaulted going to 2-nil down?

In 1852 Harrwitz was playing a match with Janos Lowenthal (1810-1876).
Harrwitz’s score at one time stood W2. D.1 L.7. So being 5 games down
Harrwitz decanted to Brighton for a brief spell to take his mind off things.

So he lost two more games by default thus making the score 9-2 in Lowenthal’s favour.

Harrwitz returned and won the match W11. D12. L.10

Look at the sharp rise in the number of draws! Remember Karpov - Kasparov
(the abandoned match). Karpov was leading 4-0 but Kasparov dug in producing draw
after draw (17 of them) till Karpov finally won another. There followed 4 more draws
till at last Kasparov won a game. Then came 14 more draws (I hope you keeping count) till Kasparov
won another, then another and another….the match was finally abandoned.

So I am now going to give all the 12 draws from the Harrwitz - Lowenthal match.

(No you bloody well aint……………….Russ)

OK how about P. Morphy - D. Harrwitz, Match, Paris 1858


White to play.

This was the last game of the match, Harrwitz should have considered resigning
here but played on and look what Morphy did to his Rook in five moves.

So that is this weeks mini theme….Rooks in Jail on RHP.

Milkers United (1687) - Long Barrow (1595) RHP 2012

So who is this?


I bet a dozen or so of you went for Humphrey Bogart (I though it was) and we
were wrong. It is infact the strong chess correspondence player Hans Berliner.

Hans won the 5th World C.C. Championship which ran from 1965-68. This game
is taken from the book ‘Startling Correspondence Chess Miniatures’ by Tim Harding.

J.Sullivan - H.Berliner, Golden Knights 1956.

mihai52 - Cinco RHP 2008

Where we see Miha52 walk into the trick mentioned in the above game.