But one thing I never got around to mentioning was an often overlooked portion of his legacy to modern-day players. I’m speaking of Vladimir Vukovic.

Vukovic wrote two volumes that are priceless to developing players: The Chess Sacrifice and The Art Of Attack. While the latter volume is still getting reprinted widely, acclaimed as a classic in the field, the other often gets ignored.

It builds off of Spielmann’s own The Art of Sacrifice in Chess, covering in more detail the area of “real” sacrifices, as Spielmann termed them (as opposed to “sham” or “pseudo” sacrifices, where the material given up must immediately be returned).

Spielmann’s work was the first to try and categorize sacrifices, and Vukovic built on that as well. Since virtually all current works on the theory of sacrifices and combinations can be traced back to the work of one of these two writers, and Vukovic himself acknowledges his debt to Spielmann, we have to conclude that we owe our current approach to sacrifices and combinations to this great Austrian player.

And for that, we doubly give thanks for Rudolf Spielmann. Without him the literature of chess would be much the poorer.

Youth often feels a burden when they mature under the shadow of those who have gone before. It’s only human nature. We feel a need to assert ourselves, and grow weary of the tales of past giants.

The player in question is certainly an excellent player: In anyone’s list of the best players to have called the state home over the past century, he should certainly figure to be in the top 20, perhaps even top 10. I mean no disparagement of him. But the problem is, the other player would be on the same list.

Among other things, the charge is offered that he was a  rabbit-basher, someone who lived off beating weaker players. This is no better than a half-truth. Our fair state doesn’t produce many high-rated players, so top players have two choices: travel or settle for playing the few good players who venture here.

Years ago, there were many more good players coming here, but beginning in the late 80’s the state was a desert of chess competition. And for a player who isn’t willing to put his real career on hold (or turn pro) the only viable option was to settle for what you could get.

But I called it a half-truth, which clearly implies part of it was false. This rabbit-basher, faced with what little 2200+ opposition that showed up, managed to log a record of 17 wins, 18 draws, and 7 losses. (This in the last decade before his retirement from the scene, long after he’d earned his senior master rating.) Scoring 62% against masters hardly is evidence that one doesn’t deserve a master’s rating, or being remembered fondly. Add in to this the National Blitz Championship Title he won, and we start to get an entirely different picture from the one put forward in the remarks that triggered this observation.

As I said, I understand where the comments come from. They’re just not accurate.

So, for those cynics I’d like to present some numbers from a Milwaukee Recreation Department document. It’s undated, but from external evidence I’d place it in the late 1950’s. It summarizes participation in the first 23 years of the Milwaukee chess program.

During the first 23 years of the program’s operation, they held 7,382 adult tournaments and 36,626 playground tournaments. In addition, they organized 1,602 matches with teams from other cities, and 1,478 chess exhibitions.

Yes, you read those numbers correctly. Before you dismiss it as hype, remember there are 17 social centers and 72 playgrounds covered by this report. That means every playground averaged about 22 tournaments during the year. Since the standard practice was to hold tournaments at the end of most organized classes, and there were multiple classes every week on every playground, that’s not as incredible as it perhaps first appeared.

During the same period they held 29,614 classes at the social centers and another 115,126 classes at the playgrounds. There was also a league (actually several leagues — by 1936 there were 14 leagues) with regular team play, as well as individual tournaments. The 23-year total of attendees was 340,182.

Before you completely boggle, remember this: the numbers here come from the period 1930-1952, about a decade before the program peaked. They are just a fraction (albeit a healthy one) of the program I saw when I was a young visitor to the city. Until present numbers rise to a significant portion of these figures, perhaps the scoffers will be willing to grant me the right to feel a little disappointed by the current levels of activity.

1) I may not be cut out to be a chess coach, but I can be a chess teacher. The difference? The amount of time you spend with individual children. I’m finding it personally draining to be talking/teaching chess with kids who only look at the game as something to pass time and get their parents off their backs. That attitude I can handle if my job is just to teach them, as the average contact with each one is just a few minutes a week. But when I’m working with them for hours several times a week, trying to get them ready for matches, trying to help them recover from losses and win the next one, having to put up with the headgames some of them want to play is just not worth the personal expenditure.

2) Having spent several months over the course of the year working with both, Chess Assistant is, at the root of it, a better design and a better approach to chess databases than ChessBase, but the execution behind it limits its utility. For example, the export functions for publication have all sorts of wonderful options and the software has ways of working with many more fonts than ChessBase has, but these features are a little buggy, so not as useful as they could be. (In the interests of fairness, some of the bugs I’ve encountered don’t seem to show up on other installations, so perhaps there’s just something about the combination of hardware and software I use — I don’t like Windows and use it only as much as I absolutely have to — that triggers these bugs.) Unlike ChessBase, ChessAssistant can spot transpositions in openings, making it more useful in openings research, though ChessBase has an “Opening Report”feature that packs a lot of information (information is data plus meaning). Also, I’ve found that when Chessbase merges games, it does so at the point in the game where it wants to, not necessarily where I want it to. Chess Assistant is better behaved, in that respect.

3) Chess in Milwaukee is on the rise again, but the rise may not include the USCF. I’m trying to find a way the USCF can make itself relevant to the growing chess scene, but frankly, I’m not coming up with enough benefits to justify the cost. Either we’re going to have to find some more benefits to offer, such as an improved magazine, or we’re going to have to cut membership dues.

4) I need to write more about chess history. I have the material, I just haven’t done the writing. I have literally thousands of games played in many venues involving Wisconsin players, or at Wisconsin events. My apologies to you all for failing in that.

5) Youth chess is rising, in both quality and quantity. For the first time one of my students has placed on the national top 100 list for his age group. Alex Betaneli, as usual, has several. Wisconsin has 2 of the top 10 of the kids 8 and under, as well as at least one representative in almost all the other age lists for boys (no women or girls, yet, alas). Slowly we’re coming back into our historical position as one of the nation’s chess centers.

6) The lack of a regular club here in Milwaukee is getting to be a handicap, instead of just an inconvenience. We need a site to meet at. I’d like to hear from readers involved in other clubs as to how they pay for sites, what they pay, if they pay, where their clubs can meet. We’re stymied at the moment.

Where does The Chessmill go from here? Pages From a Patzer’s Notebook will return, though perhaps not in the same old form. I chose the name because it was goingto be my games; if I start doing HS league games, I’ll probably change it; while I have no problem with being called a patzer, I’m not comfortable calling other people that, no matter how you might argue the truth of the appelation.

Martz Annotates will become a more regular feature as well, once I iron out the kinks in getting the game displays to work. I dislike heartily the HTML export features of every database I’ve tried. None of them produce HTML that I can look at without cringing. The java applet I’ve been using is creaking, showing its age. PalView is probably the best I’ve used, but it has problems that I’ve promised to help on. Look for more interactive game displays to begin showing up by midyear, probably.

I still have hundreds of master games, still unpublished, played over the last half-decade, to publish. And I have three interviews booked, with more to come. And some people have talked to me about spawning a hardcopy version as well. We’ll see.

As I become more familiar with WordPress, I’ll either rework the site or give up on WP.

That’s where we are and where we’re going. Hope to have you along. If I don’t see you before then, I wish you all a very merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a joyous Kwanzaa. And in the new year, may all your sacrifices be sound (except against me).

The next year, 1923, the Hamilton Chess Club invited the Milwaukee Chess Club, down for a rematch, hoping to change the score. They succeeded; this time Milwaukee won 5–1.

The latest addition to our Martz archive is a game from the North Central Open 1967 against Chicagoan Erik Karklins.

The Games

JavaScript Game Viewer

PGN file

Java Viewer

“A junior chess tournament, sponsored by the Milwaukee Department of Municipal recreation and Adult Education in co-operation with the Milwaukee Journal, attracted a total of 2,995 boys and girls of all ages from less than nine up to 17. Of this number of starters, 785 qualified for the championship finals and 701 actually played. One hundred ten won chess sets, donated by the Milwaukee Journal.”

We really knew how to throw a chess party back then, didn’t we? One more event from the string that used to be held in the Marquette University football stadium because nowhere else in town was big enough to hold it.

But we don’t. The 1967 Milwaukee City Scholastic championships (held toward the end of every summer) has been confirmed at 1535 players (Milwaukee Chess News, #1, pg 2) just nosing out the NJHS for largest tournament in the history of Milwaukee or Wisconsin.

(We continue to hear rumors about much larger tournaments, but so far we haven’t had concrete evidence of their existence. We would appreciate hearing of any evidence anyone has of older events. All the while we will, of course, attempt to put the rumors to the test ourselves.)