Frank Anderson

Frank Ross Anderson (1928–1980) was a Canadian chess master and writer. He twice won the gold medal at Chess Olympiads for the best score on Board 2. He also tied for first at the 1953 Canadian Chess Championship and won the title again in 1955.

Biography Anderson learned to play chess while bedridden as a child with rheumatoid arthritis in Toronto. He began with correspondence chess, at which he quickly became a strong player.

Anderson's first noteworthy result was in the 1946 Canadian Championship at Toronto. He scored 10/13 in the preliminaries, just missing qualification for the top section finals; he won section 2 of the finals. In 1948, he tied with future grandmaster Arthur Bisguier for first place in the US Junior Championship at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Anderson won the Ontario Open Championship in 1948, 1949, and 1951.

He twice won the Canadian Chess Championship. At Arvida in 1949, he tied for 3rd-4th, after Maurice Fox and Fedor Bohatirchuk. In 1951, he took 2nd, behind Povilas Vaitonis, at Vancouver. In 1953, he tied for 1st with Daniel Yanofsky at Winnipeg. In 1955, Anderson topped the field at Ottawa. In 1957, he tied for 3rd-4th with Miervaldis Jurševskis, after Vaitonis and Géza Füster, at Vancouver.

Anderson played three times for Canada at Chess Olympiads (1954, 1958, 1964). He won the second-board gold medal at Amsterdam 1954, with a score of +13 =2 -2, and repeated the feat at Munich 1958, with a score of +9 =3 -1.

At Munich, he came close to earning the grandmaster title, but became ill (reaction to an incorrect prescription), and was unable to play his final round, which made him ineligible. Anderson said that even if he had played and lost, he would have made the final norm necessary for the title. However, according to chess historian David Cohen, a subsequent examination of the rules then in effect did not support the claim. Anderson won a return game when Bondarevsky visited Toronto a few months later in July 1954.

Anderson scored 7/10 in the 1956 Canadian Open Chess Championship in Montreal for a shared 8th-12th place, drawing his last-round game against the 13-year-old prodigy, Bobby Fischer.

Anderson wrote a weekly chess column for the Hamilton Spectator from 1955–64, and was co-author (with Keith Kerns) of the tournament book, Fourth Biennial World Junior Chess Championship, Toronto 1957. In it, he came up with an innovation by omitting the customary dash when using descriptive notation - that is, writing PK4 instead of the normal P-K4.

A computer expert, he played with a chess program in 1958.

Anderson moved to California after the 1964 Olympiad, settling with his wife, Sylvia, in San Diego, where he ran a tax consulting business.

He was inducted posthumously into the Canadian Chess Hall of Fame in 2001.

The Canadian Encyclopedia states that: "Had Anderson's ill health not kept him from an active chess career, he would have become a grandmaster."

In 2009, American International Master John Donaldson published the chess biography, The Life and Games of Frank Anderson.

Chess style Golombek's Encyclopedia of Chess described Anderson as especially expert in opening theory. His style was precise and positional, with an emphasis on the endgame, but he could also create clever tactics. He favored 1.e4 as White, often playing the Ruy Lopez, and preferred knights to bishops.

Notable games

Three of Anderson's wins over grandmasters are given below. The competition was extremely strong: Yanofsky was an eight-time Canadian champion, Bondarevsky was a Soviet champion, and Ståhlberg was a many-time Swedish champion and a 1953 world championship candidate.