Frank Ross Anderson (3 January 1928, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada — 18 September 1980, San Diego, California, USA) was a Canadian International Master of chess, and a chess writer. He twice won gold medals at the chess Olympiads, for the best scores on his board. Anderson tied for the Canadian Chess Championship in 1953 and won this title outright in 1955.
Frank Anderson became very ill with childhood rheumatoid arthritis in Toronto, and learned to play chess while bedridden. Unable to exercise his body, he exercised his mind. He first played correspondence chess, becoming a strong player quite quickly. He was encouraged by chess promoter Bernard Freedman (who became his first sponsor), his good friend Keith Kerns and later by John G. Prentice, who served as Canada's representative to the FIDE, the World Chess Federation. Despite his physical disability, he graduated in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Toronto.
His first noteworthy result was in the 1946 Canadian Championship in Toronto. Anderson scored 10/13 in the preliminaries, just missing qualification for the top section finals; he won section 2 of the finals. Anderson won the Toronto Championship six times (1947-48-50-51-52-58). In 1948, he tied for first place in the U.S. Junior Championship in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with future Grandmaster Arthur Bisguier. He won the Ontario Open Championship in 1948, 1949, and 1951 (source: David Cohen's Canadian Chess site).
He twice won Closed Canadian Chess Championships. In 1949, he tied for 3rd-4th, after Maurice Fox and Fedor Bohatirchuk, in Arvida (CAN-ch). 1946 In 1951, he took 2nd, behind Povilas Vaitonis, in Vancouver (CAN-ch). In 1953, he tied for 1st with Daniel Yanofsky in Winnipeg (CAN-ch). In 1955, he won in Ottawa (CAN-ch). In 1957, he tied for 3rd-4th with Miervaldis Jursevskis, after Vaitonis and Géza Füster, in Vancouver (CAN-ch).
Anderson played three times for Canada in 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 Tel Aviv 1964, he scored (+4 =3 -5) on second board (http://www.olimpbase.org). He came closer to the Grandmaster title than any other player, but became ill (reaction to an incorrect prescription), and was unable to play his final round in Munich. He missed the Grandmaster title because of this. Even if he had played and lost, he would have made the final norm necessary for the Grandmaster title. His Olympiad totals were (+26 =8 -8), for 71.4 per cent. OlimpBase :: the encyclopaedia of team chess
Awarded the IM title in 1954, he became the first Canadian-born International Master.
He lost a transatlantic cable game with Igor Bondarevsky played over four days in February 1954. He played at the Canadian Hobby and Homecraft Show. But 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 8-12th place, drawing his game in the last round with 13-year-old Bobby Fischer.
He wrote a weekly chess column for The Hamilton Spectator, 1955—1964, and was co-author (along with Keith Kerns) of the tournament book of the Fourth Biennial World Junior Chess Championship, Toronto 1957. In this book, he came up with a small innovation, writing the moves in descriptive notation with no '-'; that is, he wrote PK4 instead of the normal P-K4 (see Descriptive chess notation).
He was a computer expert, and played with a computer chess program in 1958. He moved to California after the 1964 Olympiad, where he lived with his wife Sylvia, settling in San Diego, where he operated a tax consulting business.
He was inducted into the Canadian Chess Hall of Fame in 2001. In 2009, American International Master John Donaldson wrote a biography and games collection The Life and Games of Frank Anderson.
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, usually the Ruy Lopez. He liked knights over bishops.
Three of his wins over Grandmasters, shown below, with the moves given in algebraic notation. His opponents were very strong; Yanofsky was an 8-time Canadian champion, Bondarevsky was a former Soviet champion, and Stalhberg was a many-time Swedish champion and a 1953 Candidate.
