Manhattan Chess Club

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The Manhattan Chess Club , based in New York, was a traditional chess club in the United States that held a leadership role in American chess for decades. It was traditionally in competition with the younger Marshall Chess Club . It counted two world chess champions among its members and is closely connected to the history of chess .

The chess club was constituted in November 1877 in the central part of Manhattan . In the years 1890 and 1891 the world championship match between Wilhelm Steinitz and Isidor Gunsberg took place in the club rooms . In 1905, the future Cuban world champion José Raúl Capablanca joined the club, to which he always remained connected. The Manhattan Chess Club hosted the famous New York chess tournaments of 1924 and 1927; they were won by Emanuel Lasker and Capablanca. On March 7, 1942, while watching a game, Capablanca suffered a stroke in the club hall , of which he died the next day. Among the chess masters who saw their rise in the Manhattan Chess Club were Samuel Reshevsky , Bobby Fischer , who had been a member of the club since 1955, William Lombardy and Arnold Denker .

Although the Manhattan Chess Club has changed venues several times in the course of its history, in good times it had several hundred members. The club hosted the American national championship several times . The club championship was also one of the traditionally outstanding chess tournaments in the USA.

When several Wall Street managers died, who provided the club's main sponsors , its financial existence was in jeopardy. To make matters worse, the “American Chess Foundation”, which owns the building in which the club was based, fell into the hands of non-chess players. This marked the beginning of the final phase in the history of the famous club. The lease was terminated, and although the club temporarily found a new venue in a hotel in 2001, the organizational problems proved unsolvable. Finally, the Manhattan Chess Club ceased its activities in January 2002 after its 124th anniversary.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ André Schulz : The legendary Manhattan Chess Club In: de.chessbase.com. January 17, 2019, accessed November 17, 2019.