The California Chess Reporter - Volume 6

William Addison became director of the Chess Room at the Mechanics Institute in 1965. 1964-1967 saw more sweeping victories for future grandmaster Duncan Suttles. Paul Quillen got out of prison for long enough to win several important events. Jacqueline Piatigorsky organized a Second Piatigorsky Cup in 1966 with ten of the strongest players in the world competing. Two major events new were established: The National Open in Las Vegas started in 1964 and the American Open in Los Angeles stated in 1965. Both are still being played annually today. Cover Photo shows Tibor Weinberger (front left) playing Henry Gross in the game for the 1959 California Open Championship. Henry Gross had won his first five games and only needed to draw this game with white to clench the state title. Instead, he played too cautiously and Weinberger won the game in the title. In the background, Roger Smook (left) plays Gil Ramirez. The winner would have tied for first, but instead the game ended in a draw.

Kerry Lawless has been working for years and years, at least 25 years that I know of and probably a lot longer than that, on compiling every game he can, published and, where possible, unpublished that has ever been played in the State of California. The result of this great work is his website ChessDryad.com and his database calgames.pgn that contains at present 37,598 games, all played in the State of California from 1856 to the present. All of the games in California Chess Reporter here are also in his downloadable calgames.pgn database but in Algebraic Notation. Kerry Lawless has also been making great efforts to compile all chess publications published in the State of California and, as much as possible, all articles about California chess. One result of these efforts is he has compiled every issue of the California Chess Reporter during its 25 year run from 1951 to 1976. At great personal expense to himself he has had all these volumes bound by a professional binding service. These bound volumes created by Kerry Lawless have been used to make these reprints.