The new article demonstrates that an earlier report, which may still be on the internet, gave incorrect information. Among other things, it stated that Peter Winston had disappeared in late 1977, following some poor tournament results. According to the new article, Winston’s disappearance occurred on or about 26 January 1978. This would have been several months after the tournament, indicating that the two events were unrelated. The earlier report also claimed, again incorrectly, that Peter Winston was in rehabilitation for use of hard drugs. The new article makes it clear that this was not the case. The earlier report also theorized that Winston could have committed suicide, without providing any evidence that this was the case. The new article reports that Winston was not suicidal.

Late June 1974, Philadelphia: Eight young masters battled it out in the U.S. Junior Championship. It was one of the strongest fields to play up to this time. The competition was widely expected to be for second place, since at that point Larry Christiansen was nearly in a class by himself. But Peter Winston, a 16-year old prodigy from New York, kept the pace, and scored 5.5-1.5, sharing first place with Larry.

His accomplishment was all the more creditable because of the strength of the field, and the ferocity of the competition. The article on the tournament, published in Chess Life in September 1974, remarked on the fighting abilities of the players and the unusually small number of draws.

Mark Diesen, also 16 and already rated over 2300, should probably have placed third. He held Larry to a draw early on. But he went wrong against Jon Frankle – both players were in serious time pressure – and had to content himself with fourth place, while Jon took third.

The following year, however, Mark went on to place second (after Larry Christiansen), and in 1976, he shared first place. Unfortunately, Peter was unable to repeat his earlier triumph, and did poorly. It was clear that something had gone wrong in his personal life, which interfered with his skill at the game.

Of the players who finished first through fourth in 1974:

Larry Christiansen: International Grandmaster, three-time U.S. champion.

Peter Winston: missing and presumed dead, January 1978.

Jon Frankle: PhD at Berkely, and now a software engineer in Silicon Valley.

Mark Diesen: World Junior champion in 1976, and an IM. He went on to a successful second career in chemical engineering, and continued to follow chess, although he was no longer competing professionally.

Combine that with his youthful inexperience with life, need for or possible dependence on medication for his mental stability, and as mentioned in the article, a lack of physical coordination, perhaps therein lies the recipe for his disappearance and quite possibly his death.

If I had a friend that was mentally ill, and into gambling, I doubt I would let him wander off into the night at a race track in NY. However in Hertan's defense, if Winston was a faster runner than he was, and just took off . . . . . well, what could he do?

Winston won't be the first or last young (or older) chess player (mentally healthy or ill) to think he can gamble and thrive in that exciting, adrenaline rush environment, and meet with a sad end.

<I jokingly describe myself as a “recovering chess player,” and the joke conceals the truth: I spent much too much time on the game, especially as a teen-ager; though I played in tournaments and, at my patzer level, did well in them, I’ve come to think that chess reinforced several of the worst and most dangerous traits of the adolescent—or, in particular, the adolescent-intellectual—character>

That piece is too short to qualify as an article. It's just a little comment on this real piece: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2....

Is there any truth to the claim that <Arpad Elo, the FIDE Ratings Administrator, felt that it was statistically virtually impossible for a rated chess master to lose all of his games and therefore the games must have been thrown. Elo therefore refused to rate the entire tournament, thereby depriving many young players of their new FIDE ratings.>?

<<U.S> Master and TD, Bill Goichberg, wrote of Winslow’s last event...>

<It's hard to decide whether the book "The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlen and the Match That Made Chess Great Again" is good or just hopeless. The blurbs on the back are all from non-chess players and all equally praising its merits.

But this is a book by a non-chess player who writes about his own encounter with chess as a youngster, then abandoned for other pursuits. During the course of covering the games of the Carlsen-Karjakin World Championship match for a book, he drags up the usual suspects of deviancy or proof of chess's inability to capture the general public's mindset because of its elite mentality. No one understands it beyond those who play it and they are clearly deviant.

As evidence, he drags out the usual suspects: Morphy, who runs his law practice into the ground by alienating his clients with obsessive rants about chess; Steinitz, who was institutionalized in a Moscow sanitorium bragging about playing chess with God; Minckwitz, who threw himself under a train; Rubinstein, who suffered from pathological shyness and paranoia, Bloodgood the murderer, Fischer, Josh Waitzkin and Peter Winston.

Who was that last one? you might ask, as the chess community is good at forgetting its failures in pursuit of its next champion. The author spends a whole chapter on this guy, basically describing a player's descent into paranoia that looks a lot like Fischer's. Winston was a young promising player at the time of Fischer who just disappeared one night during a huge snowstorm in the New York area. To this day they've never recovered his body or discovered if he just went into hiding. The chess community has little about it, even here.

The author interviews Frank Brady about Winston (and Fischer, btw), and Richard Brody, a childhood friend of Winston, who remembers him fondly, and tries to interview Winston's sister, who tells him that, even after 40 years, "she still wasn't sure if she was ready to talk about Peter."

The book is full of characters like this, full of mental defects, kooks and people you'd never want your children around, making me wonder which book the blurbers read. His musing "How it's those closest to greatness...who must sacrifice everything so that champions can abandon nearly all the ordinary responsibilities of life" sums up the whole book, yet he, as a writer, never reflects that this is exactly how James Joyce treated his own brother.

One of the few bright spot in the book is his interview with Judit Polgar, there to comment on the match for the chess community. Polgar debunks his whole thesis that chess somehow makes youngsters deviant and creates warped adults. On his comment about Fischer that the ultimate pleasure in chess is "crushing your opponent's ego," she says, "That was Bobby's attitude...I don't think most players share that view."

And he never acknowledges that with 600 MILLION+ adherents to this pursuit, you're bound to find a few weirdos. It would probably happen in any activity, and indeed does. Think of outrageous boxers' comments, or artists or politicians. There's no end of crazy people everywhere. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with everyone else involved.

'.. The State of New York has over 30,000 unidentified bodies buried within the state. If Peter were still alive, he would be sixty-three years old this year. ..'

https://truecrimemysteries.medium.c...

from True Crime Mysteries by Megan Ashley, 2021

Related

https://dnadoeproject.org/

Unrelated

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXd...