Grandmaster Ben Finegold recently posted a video in which he discusses International Master Calvin Blocker's chess career, notes that Blocker clearly played at Grandmaster strength at his peak, and analyzes three of Blocker's wins, including a brilliant victory as Black against three-time U.S. Chess Champion (1987, 1995, 1998) Nick DeFirmian.
Finegold points out that Blocker's aggressive style of play often leads to decisive results, and that Blocker is a fearless player who turns down draws even against higher rated players. Blocker is a chess artist and chess perfectionist who will spend 45 minutes on a single move in a search for the truth in a chess position. Before I met Blocker, I remember hearing stories about how hard he would fight for the tiniest advantage, one example being his epic Ohio Chess Congress game versus Errol Leibowitz that lasted several hours and over 100 moves.
I was delighted to watch Finegold's video, and I hope that it brings back great memories for the 40 and over crowd while providing an education to the younger chess aficionados:
Finegold weaves biographical details into the video and in the game analysis, but it is worth taking a deeper look at Blocker's career, particularly for those younger than 40 who may not fully appreciate Blocker's accomplishments.
International Master Calvin Blocker has won a record 15 Ohio Chess Championships (1981-82, 1984-89, 1995, 1997, 1999-2000, 2005, 2008, 2013). State chess championship records are lamentably incomplete, but Blocker must rank very highly on the list of most state chess championships won in one state; John Curdo, who has won at least 17 Massachusetts championships, is the only player I can think of who would be ahead of Blocker for sure. Blocker is not only an Ohio chess legend as a player, but he is a well-regarded coach whose students included Marc Esserman, who became an International Master and published chess author.
Blocker's first love was music, and he was a concert pianist as a teenager before shifting his focus to chess (if you ask Blocker, he will insist that he never gave up piano, but it can at least be said that he stopped receiving formal piano training and doing formal piano performances). Despite being a late starter by chess standards, Blocker became a FIDE Master at age 26 and an International Master at age 27. In the current era during which teenagers become Grandmasters, those numbers may not seem impressive, but Blocker lived in Ohio in the pre-computer chess/pre-internet era and in the context of those conditions his rise was remarkable.
Achieving a high standard in either music or chess is quite an accomplishment, but to do so in both fields is most impressive.
Blocker never attained the Grandmaster title because of a lack of opportunities to play in Grandmaster norm tournaments. The U.S. Chess Federation (USCF) only has online rating records dating back to 1991, but I did some archival research in old Chess Life magazines, and I confirmed that in April 1990 Blocker ranked 13th in the United States with a 2650 USCF rating:
That means that Blocker was higher rated than many players who participated in the U.S. Closed Championship during that era. It is also worth noting that many of the top players were closely bunched together; Blocker was just 21 points lower rated than Michael Wilder (sixth on the list) and 31 points lower rated than Maxim Dlugy (fifth on the list). Points are harder to gain and easier to lose at the very top of the rating list--so 20 or 30 points at that level means more than 20 or 30 points at the amateur level--but any way you look at it Blocker was one of the very best chess players in the country at that time.
Blocker did not maintain that lofty perch by protecting his rating, either; he was 47th on the list of most active players, having played 190 rated games in the previous calendar year:
When Blocker was at his peak, the International Master title and the Grandmaster title were much less commonly achieved than they are now. In 1989, the U.S. barely had three dozen Grandmasters and fewer than 65 International Masters:
Currently, the U.S. has over 100 Grandmasters. Are players that much stronger today than they were over 30 years ago? There certainly has been a proliferation of available basic knowledge via computer chess programs and via the internet, but knowledge is not the same as understanding; old school titled players not only knew where the pieces belong but they knew why the pieces belonged there. There is a difference between saying "I traded off his bishop to weaken his dark squares" and "I traded off his bishop because the engine says that gives me a .8 advantage."
Also, ratings have no intrinsic meaning outside of the context of the rating pool. In other words, being rated 2650 in 1989 when that places you 13th in the country is more impressive than being rated 2700 now when that does not even get you in the top 15. The ELO rating system is based on percentage expectancy and the difference between two ratings; that is why Bobby Fischer's 2785 rating is more impressive than Magnus Carlsen's 2800+ rating: Fischer was more than 100 points ahead of the rest of the world, while Carlsen's nearest competitors are much closer to him than that. We don't know who would win a hypothetical match between prime Fischer and prime Carlsen, but we do know that prime Fischer was much further ahead of his rivals than prime Carlsen is ahead of his rivals. Similarly, we don't know how prime Blocker would do against today's young guns, but we do know that prime Blocker learned chess at a relatively late age in a non-computer/non-internet era without being based in a national chess hotbed and he nearly cracked the top 10 in the entire country.
During my archival research, I found this gem from the March 1989 issue of Chess Life:
Julie Anne Desch used to write profiles of chess Masters. In the above article, Blocker talked about his varied interests, including piano, chess, running, and fencing. Blocker said, "Fencing is physical chess...chess is a physical game played on a mental plane and it's won at the mental level...fencing is a mental game played on a physical plane, and it's won on a physical level--on a level of competitiveness, stress, and stress management...but the training techniques in any physical sport are highly relative to chess."
Some commentators dismiss the connections and similarities between chess and physical sports but Blocker correctly notes that those connections are real and they are significant. This is not about making a trite statement such as "Chess is life and life is chess"; this is about the strong parallels between the mental and physical training regimens of chess champions compared to the mental and physical training regimens of other elite athletes.
Blocker is an extrovert and a showman; as entertaining as his games are, it can be even more entertaining to watch him talk about his games in a post-mortem session. In 1989, an issue of the Ohio Chess Bulletin showed a picture of Blocker analyzing an Ohio Chess Congress game while surrounded by a group of spectators (including me), and the caption said something to the effect of, "Blocker analyzes while spectators look on in awe." That was not hyperbole; I was in awe of him, and I was far from the only one. I first met Blocker at the 1989 Ohio Chess Congress, and he was the strongest chess player I had met up to that time.
I have known Blocker for over 30 years, and crossed swords with him over a dozen times in rated play, scoring just one draw (of which I am very proud). Any chess player over 40 years old in Ohio or the Midwest surely knows about Blocker, but when I was at a recent Ohio tournament it took my breath away for a moment when a much younger friend of mine saw Blocker--who attended the tournament but did not play--and asked me who he is. I explained simply, "He is an International Master who won 15 Ohio Chess Championships and was once ranked in the top 20 in the country with a 2650 USCF rating."
The passage of time is sobering, and those of us who know (or lived in!) the distant past have a responsibility to preserve the great names and events that deserve to be remembered. I appreciate Finegold's video, and I embrace the opportunity to supplement that video with what I know and what I have observed about IM Calvin Blocker.
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