Who won the 1956 U.S. Speed Chess Championships?
Who came in second?
Isn’t that it the USCF’s Hall of Records?
That would be a place to look. It might not tell you who came in second. The winner was also the first Armed Forces Champion.
Setting up a ‘hall of records’ (though I still think that’s a LOUSY name for it) is relatively easy, POPULATING it is a lot of work.
Posted: 7 June 2007 04:42 AM
kbachler
But who’s going to populate it?
Life members with nothing else to do.
There are quite a few websites out there with compiled lists of interesting chess facts. It would be easy enough to get a nice start on it if a few of those agreed to contribute.
Great idea , We have the skill set to do it. Their are over 9000 life members that may have been teachers or IT professionals. The only problem I see is how to preserve it. This weekend I was looking up Theodore Smith who worked at Chess Review Magazine. Much of the details are now missing on the Internet. Things on the Internet change.
The skill set and the motivation to do it are only part of the battle. You have to have access to the data and a tool to put it into a common format.
FWIW, here’s what Judy Misner found:
Coordination of efforts is also important, it doesn’t do much good if 10 people all do the same event, especially if they don’t all summarize it the same way.
Close but no cigar?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Feuerstein
Maybe that was in a different year?
One of the weaknesses of the wiki format is that errors aren’t always easy to catch or correct. (And when people can’t agree on what the facts are, then life really gets interesting.)
Wikipedia is sometimes useful, but must be treated with caution. The entry linked to above is based on an article by Bill Wall at chess.com/article/view/biogr … by-fischer. A closer reading of Wall’s article suggests that whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry misinterpreted it. It appears that the tournament referred to was not the “U.S. Speed Chess Championship,” but rather a speed tournament held in conjunction with the U.S. Junior, held several months before the U.S. Open. There are still a few people around who played in that tournament (David Kerman, for example), but whether they would remember a 50-year-old blitz tournament is another matter.
It might be a good idea to have a hall of records while the information is still available.
It would be a good way to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the USCF.
As this thread has demonstrated, the information isn’t really ‘available’ today, at least not in a machine readable form.
Here we have two people who took information originally in print form and converted it into some kind of electronic format.
Let’s say each of those exercises took five minutes of time.
Now multiply that five minutes of time by the number of items you think should be in the online archive, and you have a first order estimate of the amount of hours needed to populate that archive.
I call this a first order estimate because some items may take less than five minutes, some may take a lot more than five minutes, like entering all the players who played in the 1965 US Open and their scores. (We probably need more than just the raw crosstables, those may not indicate tiebreaks or other interesting factoids.)
Let’s say we have 50,000 entries we’d like to have in an online archive. At an average of five minutes each, that’s 250,000 minutes, or about two man-years of time.
Is 50,000 a reasonable number of entries, or should it be several times that?
This is pretty much the textbook definition of a ‘labor intensive task’.
That the two pieces of data cited in this thread purport to be the same but are clearly different illustrates another aspect of the problem, accurate summarization of the information before or as it is entered into the archive.
The good news (such as it is) is that quite a bit of the print material from Chess Life and previous USCF publications back in the 50’s, 60’s and part of the 70’s has been scanned and is available on CDs, thanks to the work of Tim Tobiason, who spent around a year scanning material supplied to him by the USCF office. The bad news is that those CDs are basically just scanned pages, which means NONE of the encoding work to get it into archive format has been done yet.
Now, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good idea, it does mean that it won’t be something that can be achieved just by a Delegate mandate. Either we’re going to have to spend a lot of money paying staff to build up those archives or we’re going to have to set up a massive volunteer project, with a lot of oversight.
How many people work on wiki? I’ve heard some say it is several hundred thousand, with hundreds of ‘overseers’.
Assuming that volunteer effort is the way to go, the important question here may be: Steve, are you willing to chair a committee to coordinate a volunteer network to build up a ‘hall of records’?
The printed word is also suspect.
It looks like “Age 65 and Over “ players like David Kerman and Art Feurstein will be remembered for their losses and not their outstanding chess careers.
“Larry Parr” and “old days” don’t go well together in a sentence. Parr was editor for a couple of years in the 1980s. Any comparison between the magazine then and the one in the 1950s (would have been Chess Review then) is a real stretch.
Back in the 1950’s and 60’s Chess Review was an independent publication, published by Al Horowitz, not by the USCF. The USCF bought the rights to it, which was why for a while the title of the USCF’s publication was ‘Chess Life & Review’.
So what should the name of the “Hall of Records” be? I have been gathering a lot of information from my collection of WASHINGTON CHESS LETTER and NORTHWEST CHESS. Some can be found at http://www.nwchess.com
We have most of the crosstables for Washington Closed events and working on posting the ones for Oregon. For the ones from 1992 on we provide the link to the MSA section of the USCF website. Have a list of the editors of the publications. I have an unposted list of tournament winners for a number of Washington and Oregon events for a number of years. This needs a lot more added to it. I assume there are other state websites with lists of chess history.
Russell Miller Camas WA