September 1967 'On the Cover'

After last month's 'On the Cover', August 1967 ('not a particularly inspiring month for the regular "On the Cover" post'), the two main U.S. chess magazines returned to business as usual. CL featured the top American junior tournament and CR featured a top international tournament.

Left: 'Salvatore Matera : U.S. Junior Champion'
Right: 'Victor of Moscow'

Chess Life

Salvatore [Sal] Matera, a 16-year-old Junior at Brooklyn Preparatory School, forged ahead at the halfway mark and clinched the title in the semi-final round in winning the second annual United States Junior Chess Championship with a 5 1/2 - 1 1/2 score. The tournament, an eight-player event conducted by the U.S. Chess Federation in cooperation with the Piatigorsky Foundation, was played July 10-16 at the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York City.

For the 'first annual' event, won by Walter Browne, see last year's July 1966 'On the Cover'. Browne finished second in the 1967 event.

Chess Review

As someone has said before us, the international tournament at Moscow must be surely the strongest of 1967, even more so than the coming Interzonal. We would of course have liked to see Robert J. Fischer in it, and Boris Ivkov, Bent Larsen and, on his showing of late, Milan Matulovich ought to have been invited. But others could doubtless be suggested including a raft of Russians -- Viktor Korchnoy conspicuously! Dr. Petar Trifunovich has a story on this tournament coming up for us (just too late for this issue) next month.

[The name is 'Stein', Leonid Stein. Nowhere in CR's brief preliminary report is the full name of the winner mentioned.]

Let's anticipate next month's CR report with some links. Chessgames.com has two reports on the event, a 'TID' (tournament ID?) and a 'CID' (collection ID?):-

• Moscow (1967); tid=79435
• Moscow 1967; cid=1014896

I should know more about CG's TIDs and CIDs -- but I don't -- so I'll try to come back to this in another post. Another top result on a search for 'chess moscow 1967' is:-

• Moscow 50th Jubilee International 1967 (ecforum.org.uk)

Echoing the CR writeup, that forum post raises questions about the politics surrounding the event. I'll also examine that topic in a future post.