Larry Melvyn Evans (March 22, 1932 – November 15, 2010) was an American chess player, author, and journalist who received the FIDE title of Grandmaster (GM) in 1957. He won or shared the U.S. Chess Championship five times and the U.S. Open Chess Championship four times. He wrote a long-running syndicated chess column and wrote or co-wrote more than twenty books on chess.
Chess career
Early years
Evans was born on March 22, 1932, in Manhattan, the son of Bella (Shotl) and Harry Evans.[1] His family was Jewish.[2] He learned much about the game by playing for ten cents an hour on 42nd Street in New York City,[citation needed] quickly becoming a rising star. At age 14, he tied for 4th–5th place in the Marshall Chess Club championship. The next year he won it outright, becoming the youngest Marshall champion at 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. At 16, he played in the 1948 U.S. Chess Championship, his first, tying for eighth place at 11½–7½.[3] Evans tied with Arthur Bisguier for first place in the U.S. Junior Chess Championship of 1949. By age 18, he had won a New York State championship as well as a gold medal in the Dubrovnik 1950 Chess Olympiad. In the latter, his 90% score (eight wins and two draws) on sixth board tied with Rabar of Yugoslavia for the best result of the entire Olympiad.[4]
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 Chess 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. He also won the first Lone Pine tournament in 1971.[11]
Olympiad successes
Evans represented the U.S. in eight Chess Olympiads over a period of twenty-six years, winning gold (1950), silver (1958), and bronze (1976) medals for his play, and participating in team gold (1976) and silver (1966) medals.[12][13][14]
Evans (right) helping Fischer prepare for his World Championship match
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. He was Fischer's second for the Candidates matches leading up to the World Chess Championship 1972 against Boris Spassky, though not for the championship match itself, after a disagreement with Fischer.
He also wrote the introductions to Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games (1969) and urged Fischer to publish when he had initially been reluctant to do so.[18]
Chess journalism
Evans had always been interested in writing as well as playing. By the age of 18, he had already published David Bronstein's Best Games of Chess, 1944–1949 and the Vienna International Tournament, 1922. His book New Ideas in Chess was published in 1958, and was reprinted in 2011. He wrote or co-wrote more than twenty books on chess.[19]
He wrote the tenth edition of the important openingstreatiseModern Chess Openings (1965), co-authored with editor Walter Korn. Some of Evans's other books are Modern Chess Brilliancies (1970), What's The Best Move (1973), and Test Your Chess I.Q. (2001).
Evans began his career in chess journalism during the 1960s, helping to found the American Chess Quarterly, which ran from 1961 to 1965. He was an editor of Chess Digest during the 1960s and 1970s. For over thirty years, until 2006, he wrote a question-and-answer column for Chess Life, the official publication of the United States Chess Federation (USCF), and has also written for Chess Life Online. His weekly chess column, Evans on Chess, has appeared in more than fifty separate newspapers throughout the United States. He also wrote a column for the World Chess Network.
Evans also contributed a large amount of tutorial and other content to the Chessmaster computer game series, most notably an endgame quiz and annotations of classic chess games. He was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame in 1994.
Criticism of writings
Larry Evans was a prolific author, with many who both liked and disliked his works.
Noted chess author and trainer International MasterJohn L. Watson made the following observations on Evans's books and columns: "huge bias"; "long histories of ignoring and distorting evidence" and "Evans' absurd arguments".[20]
By contrast, chess author and International Master Anthony Saidy noted that Evans brought to his journalism a "taste for intriguing chess", his personal experience at "the summit of US chess", and "sharp opinions" regarding the politics of chess, which contributed to his "spicy, concise columns".[21]
Author and USCF National Master Bruce Pandolfini described Larry Evans's New Ideas in Chess as influential and a "first-rate chess book".[22]
Leading chess historian Edward Winter, however, has noted numerous factual errors in Evans' work as well as several examples of possible plagiarism.[23]
On page 175 of Evans' book, Modern Chess Brilliancies, he claims Lodewijk Prins adjourned a clearly lost position against Cuban master Quesada and was lucky enough when the latter died of a heart attack the "next day". Prins noted that he had actually resigned the position, as is proven by the tournament crosstables showing it as a loss for him, and that Quesada played three more games in the tournament before dying five days after the game against Prins. While Evans acknowledged the error, he defended it with "you must admit it makes a good story."[24]
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