A few years ago, Sam Sloan posted a moving story on rec.games.chess.misc and on his own website about how he had found Raymond Weinstein, a great American chess hopeful of around 1960, who had disappeared from chess, and from the world it seemed, after the US Championship of 1963/64. Weinstein turned out to have killed a man in 1964, and had been confined to a mental institution ever since. For more details, see Sloan's stories on his site, I have found Raymond Weinstein, and Getting Raymond Weinstein out of jail.

When I contacted Sloan to ask him if he knew anything about Weinstein's episode in Amsterdam, he replied: 'I have heard that he assaulted somebody and got into trouble over there and had to be rushed back to the USA, where he got into even more trouble.'

That was indeed the footnote I wanted to add to the Weinstein story.

In the early sixties, in the Amsterdam chess café which was then still on Leidseplein, I met a nice American guy of around twenty with incredibly thick glasses: Raymond Weinstein. He was already a celebrity in chess; had been third in the US Championship at 18, had played for the US Olympiad team, and had won the student's World Team Championship with the US - he was a future top level grandmaster.

I don't think I ever played chess with him and I also don't remember him coming to the chess café very often - but we did talk a few times there, and I clearly remember that one time I brought him, on the back seat of my scooter, from the chess café to some other place in Amsterdam, and that he didn't seem at ease with my style of riding.

He was not in Amsterdam for chess, but to study psychology; he wanted to be a psychiatrist. He was in contact here with Johan Barendregt, who was both a psychology professor and an international chessmaster, and whose name lives on in chess mainly for his 5.0-0 in the Exchange Variation of the Ruy Lopez. Weinstein stayed with Barendregt for a while - perhaps I brought him there that time.

One day, there was a rumor at the chess café that Weinstein had tried to kill Barendregt. He had become mad at something and had attacked Barendregt with a weapon; Barendregt had been injured, but had been able to ward off Weinstein. We didn't see Weinstein any more after that.

Several chessplayers in Amsterdam remember that story, but nobody remembers details. Barendregt died in 1982. One chess friend, also a psychologist, who had been friendly with Weinstein in 1960 in Leningrad at that Students Olympiad which the US had won, had found him quite paranoid there already. Weinstein was hot-tempered, always felt treated badly, and accused my friend of double-crossing him for buying Russian chessbooks that Weinstein had wanted to buy himself.