This Week's ChessBase Show: Tarjan in Action

Sadly for American chess fans, many of our best players have given up the game and gone into other fields, and one such player is grandmaster James Tarjan. Tarjan gave up the game in his early 30s, in 1984, and became a librarian. This is some library's gain, but definitely our loss! He was a player with a very attractive style, and more than that was one of the nicest players I ever met or faced over the chess board. I played him once, in my early teens, and don't recall putting up much of a challenge. Nevertheless, he was very gracious and we looked at the game afterwards for what seemed like a long time in my youthful memory. There were no airs, no "I'm a GM, so listen up and take me at my word" sort of attitude, just a very gentle manner that I remember to this day. (This doesn't mean he wasn't a fighter at the board - he was! But there was no sense that he was trying to beat the person on the other side of the board.)

Personal qualities aside, he was also an exceptional player - he was (and is) a GM, after all. So in this week's show, we'll take a look at two very entertaining games of his, both played in the mid-1970s when he was an up-and-comer. Both games are short, but have very different characteristics. One is an ultra-sharp Dragon Sicilian, the second is a Modern, and both games will rivet your attention.

To watch, just join me on Wednesday night at 9 p.m. ET (or 3 a.m. Thursday morning CET) in the Broadcast room of the Playchess server. You'll find it under the Games tab - just look for "Tarjan-Games" and you're there. Hope to see you then!

Comments

[Icepick]

Isn't there a story behind Tarjan becoming one of the (then) leading authorities on the Dragon? Something about him working at a logging camp in the Pacific NW with only a book on the Dragon to keep him company? I'm pretty sure I remember that story, and I think I know which book it's in, but unfortunately I can't get to it tonight without waking up my wife. I'll see if I can find it tomorrow.

[Critic]

hmm...How do you manage to come up with the games of these obscure players and not of some of the leading players of current generation.

[Brian Karen]

I'd be hard pressed to think of a great player from the past or present that Dennis has not covered on his show. Maybe the anonymous critic can enlighten me ?

[Icepick]

Here's a version of the story I mentioned:

Only after remedying his opening weakness did Tarjan demonstrate his true ability and he remedied it in an odd way: He signed up to work on a construction project, where for weeks his only outlet after a day of physical labor was a chess set and a book on the Dragon Variation of the Sicilian Defense. By September 1973 Tarjan had refuted many of the older lines, discovered his own favorites and was soon one of the world’s experts on this complex, aggressive variation.

- from page 214 of The U.S. Chess Championship, 1845-1985 by Gene H. McCormick and GM Andy Soltis (first edition) (An updated version of the book can be found at Amazon.)

I recall a version of this story in which it was a logging camp in the Pacific NW, but that might be memory playing tricks on me.

[Icepick]

BTW Tarjan would have been 21 in Spetember 1973.

Also, Tarjan isn't that obscure to anyone familiar with the American chess scene in the 1970s and early 1980s. He was also an editor (in the early 1980s) of the Player's Chess News, an earlier attempt at a chess newspaper/weekly magazine of current events. (I remember that Chess Life back then only reported on big international stories something like four or five months after they had happened - when they bothered at all.) It didn't last long, but it was a precursor to Yasser Seirawan's Inside Chess (started around 1989 IIRC). With instant reporting via TWIC, Chess Today, Chess Base, et al this stuff doesn't seem remarkable now, but living outside of New York City and a few other big metro areas, stuff like PCN and Inside Chess were lifelines to American chess players in the pre- and early-Internet days.

Which gets me to another point, counter Critic's comment above. Dennis puts a fair amount of work into digging up games that aren't that well-known. I imagine it is because he doesn't want to cover the same territory that everyone else is covering. So the games of the current big players will mostly be skipped, because they're already covered everywhere else. Why trod over the same ground again for an instructional lecture?

[Van west]

LA Times did a rather sad article called 'Tragedy of a Grandmaster" about Tarjan a couple decades or more back. If I recall it's about how he decided to quit chess and become a librarian. Of course he might be happier now than if he kept playing chess, who knows?

[Dennis Monokroussos]

critic: It's comparatively easy to find recent games, and I've annotated hundreds if not thousands of them on this blog and its predecessors the past five years. It's also the case, however, that great games were played before Carlsen, Nakamura et al were born (and before Kasparov was born, before Karpov, Fischer, etc.), and are sometimes played by people who aren't 2700+.

[Dennis Monokroussos]

Icepick and Brian: Thanks for the moral support!

Icepick: Thanks too for the story on Tarjan and the Dragon!

[Thomas]

@Van west: I wonder about the overall tone and content of the LA Times article. As you say, Tarjan may well be happy or happier with his "new life". As Dennis wrote, it's a loss to (American) chess fans. There are many other examples (e.g. Piket here in the Netherlands), some players actually returned to the professional scene after doing something else for a while: McShane, Reinderman (to name another Dutchie), Kamsky.
I would reserve the word "tragedy" for cases which are tragic at all levels: personal, national and global. Of course Bobby Fischer is one example, another one is Estonian GM Lembit Oll who committed suicide at the age of 33 due to depression and divorce (see the tribute by Ehlvest and Yermolinsky in New in Chess 6/2009).

@Dennis and/or critic: I fully agree with Icepick and Brian. Beyond that, shouldn't we all be grateful to Dennis for what he does, rather than accusing him of "doing the wrong things"? Maybe - just a suggestion - Dennis can combine both (up to date and off the well-beaten track) in some future shows, covering players such as Moscow Open winner Chernyshov (*1967, my age ...) or current Aeroflot leader Le Quang Liem.