Larry Evans

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Larry Melvyn Evans (born March 23, 1932) is an American chess grandmaster and journalist. He has won the U.S. Chess Championship four times.

Contents 1 Chess career 2 Chess journalism 3 Selected games 4 Selected books 5 External links

[edit] Chess career

Evans was born in Manhattan and learned much about the game by playing for ten cents an hour on 42nd Street in New York City. He became a rising young star. At 14, he tied for 4th-5th in the Marshall Chess Club championship. The next year he won it outright, becoming the youngest Marshall champion up until that time. He also finished equal second in the U.S. Junior Championship, which led to an article in the September 1947 issue of Chess Review. Evans tied with Arthur Bisguier for first place in the U.S. Junior Championship of 1949. By 18, he had won a New York State championship as well as a gold medal in the Dubrovnik Chess Olympiad of 1950. In 1951, he won his first U.S. Chess Championship ahead of Samuel Reshevsky. He went on to win the national championship another three times - in 1962, 1968 and 1980, the last in a tie with Walter Browne and Larry Christiansen.

Titles quickly followed and Evans was awarded an International Master title by FIDE in 1952. In 1956 the U.S. State Department appointed him a "chess ambassador" and he became a Grandmaster in 1957.

Evans performed well in many U.S. events during the 1960s and 1970s but his trips abroad to international tournaments were infrequent and less successful. He won the U.S. Open Championship in 1951, 1952, 1954 (he tied with Arturo Pomar but won the title on the tie-break) and tied with Walter Browne in 1971. In addition he won the first Lone Pine tournament in 1971 and represented the U.S. in seven Chess Olympiads over a period of twenty years, winning one gold medal and one silver medal for his play, and in 1966 one team silver medal.

His best results on foreign soil included two wins at the Open Canadian Chess Championship, 1956 in Montreal, and 1966 in Kingston, Ontario. He finished first in the 1975 Portimao International in Portugal and second equal behind Jan Hein Donner in Venice, 1967. However, his first, and what subsequently proved to be his only, crack at the World Chess Championship title ended in a disappointing 14th place in the Amsterdam Interzonal of 1964.

He never entered the world championship cycle again, and concentrated his efforts on assisting his fellow American Bobby Fischer in his quest for the world title. Evans tutored his friend from 1968-72 and guided Fischer to his capturing of the world title in the famous match against Boris Spassky in 1972.

At his peak in October 1968 he was rated 2631 USCF.

[edit] Chess journalism

Evans had always been interested in writing as well as playing and before the age of eighteen he had already published David Bronstein's Best Games of Chess, 1944-1949 and the Vienna International Tournament, 1922. Today he is credited with having written or co-written over fifty books on chess, some of which are classics of the genre. In 1958 his New Ideas in Chess proved very influential on the chess players of the 1950s and 1960s and it has been a consistent seller over the years.

Other well received books include Modern Chess Brilliancies (1970), What's The Best Move (1973) and Test Your Chess I.Q. (2001). He revised the tenth edition of Modern Chess Openings (1965), co-authored with editor Walter Korn. At the time, many players considered it to be 'the Chessplayer's Bible', and it is now a collector's item. He also made a significant contribution to Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games (1969) and had urged the future World Champion to publish when he had initially been reluctant to do so.

During the 1960s Evans developed a very successful career in chess journalism and helped found the American Chess Quarterly which ran from 1961-65. He was an editor of Chess Digest during the 60s and 70s and he still writes regularly for Chess Life, the official publication of the United States Chess Federation (USCF). His popular question and answer column was read by more than 250,000 readers every month and ran for over thirty years, but was cut in 2006 as part of a new editor seeking a new look for the magazine. His weekly chess column, Evans on Chess, has appeared in more than fifty separate newspapers throughout the United States. He also writes a column for the World Chess Network.

Evans has also commentated on some of the biggest matches for Time magazine and ABC's Wide World of Sports, including the 1972 Fischer versus Spassky match, the 1993 PCA world title battle between Gary Kasparov and Nigel Short and the Braingames world chess championship match between Vladimir Kramnik and Gary Kasparov in 2000.

His contributions to chess writing and journalism have earned him many awards, including the USCF's Chess Journalist of the Year award in 2000. He was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame in 1994.

[edit] Selected games

This game, against future grandmaster Abe Yanofsky, who had won the brilliancy prize against Botvinnik at Groningen the year before, was Evans' first victory against a noted player:

Yanofsky-Evans, U.S. Open, Corpus Christi 1947 1.e4 Nf6 2.e5 Nd5 3.d4 d6 4.Nf3 Bg4 5.h3 Bxf3 6.Qxf3 dxe5 7.dxe5 e6 8.a3 Nc6 9.Bb5 Qd7 10.c4 Nde7 11.0-0 Qd4 12.Bg5 a6 13.Bxe7? axb5 14.Bxf8 Rxf8 15.cxb5 Nxe5 16.Qe2 0-0-0 17.Nc3 Ng6 18.Rad1 Qe5 19.Qc2 Rxd1 20.Rxd1 Rd8 21.Rc1 Nf4 22.Kh1 Qg5 23.Rg1? (23. f3) Qh5! 24.Kh2? Rd3! 25.f3 (see diagram at left) 25...Rxf3! 26.Rd1? (26.Rc1 protecting the queen) 26...Nxh3!! Larry Parr wrote, "Larry Evans recalls 'a rush' as he played this spectacular crusher. 'This victory,' he wrote in a recent e-mail, 'gave me my first taste of fame. If I could beat the guy who beat Botvinnik, perhaps someday I could also beat Botvinnik!'"[1] 27.gxf3 Nf2+ 28.Kg3 Qh3+! 29.Kf4 Qh2+ 30.Ke3 Ng4+! 0-1 If 31.Kd3, Ne5+ wins White’s queen.

[edit] Selected books

• What's the Best Move? (1995) ISBN 0-671-51159-9
• The 10 Most Common Chess Mistakes (1998) ISBN 1-58042-009-5
• How Good Is Your Chess? (2004) ISBN 1-58042-126-1
• New Ideas in Chess (1967) Cornerstone Library ISBN 0-486-28305-4 (1984 Dover edition)
• Modern Chess Brilliancies (1970) Fireside Simon and Schuster ISBN 0-671-22420-4
• Modern Chess Openings (1965). 10th edition, revised by Larry Evans, edited by Walter Korn. Pitman Publishing

• Evans on Chess (1974). Cornerstone Library.

[edit] External links

• FIDE rating card for Larry Evans
• Larry Evans at ChessGames.com
• Larry Evans download 419 of his games in pgn format.
• Several columns by Larry Evans
• http://www.worldchessnetwork.com/English/chessNews/evans/bio.php
• Statistics at ChessWorld.net
• The facts abour Larry Evans, a critical article by Edward Winter

Preceded by Herman Steiner	United States Chess Champion 1951–1954	Succeeded by Arthur Bisguier
Preceded by Bobby Fischer	United States Chess Champion 1961	Succeeded by Bobby Fischer
Preceded by Bobby Fischer	United States Chess Champion 1968	Succeeded by Samuel Reshevsky
Preceded by Lubomir Kavalek	United States Chess Champion 1980 (with Walter Browne and Larry Christiansen)	Succeeded by Walter Browne and Yasser Seirawan