Arthur Dake

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Arthur William Dake (April 8, 1910 – April 28, 2000) was an American chess player from Portland, Oregon. He was born Artur Darkowski; his father was Polish and his mother Norwegian. They moved to the United States before World War I. At age 16, Dake became a merchant seaman and traveled to Japan, China, and the Philippines. He returned to high school in Oregon in 1927 and learned chess from a Russian immigrant at a local YMCA. After more sea work, he reached New York City in 1929, where he and a leading checkers player ran a Coney Island chess and checkers stand for challengers. The Wall Street Crash ended that business.

Dake’s first major chess tournament was the 1930 New York State Championship, where he finished third. In 1931 he won the Marshall Chess Club championship. During the Great Depression, the United States dominated many world chess events, and Dake was a key member of the U.S. team in the Olympiads of 1931, 1933, 1935, and 1937, helping win team gold in 1935 and silver in 1933. In 1932, he became the first American to defeat the World Champion, Alexander Alekhine, in a game played in Pasadena. He had several strong finishes in national and international events in the mid-1930s.

Dake met his wife Helen on a return trip from Warsaw in 1935. During the Depression, he moved back to Portland and worked for the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles for more than 30 years. After World War II, he played for the United States in other events, including a 1946 tour in Moscow and a 1950 radio match against Yugoslavia.

In the 1950s he won the Oregon Open three times and played in U.S. Open events. He slowed down in the 1960s but returned for Lone Pine tournaments in the 1970s and 1980s, where he defeated strong players and kept competing. In 1987 he played in the U.S. Open in Portland and finished well at age 77. Dake earned the title of International Master in 1954 and received an honorary Grandmaster title in 1986 for his achievements in the 1930s. He was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame in 1991 and is remembered as the oldest competitive chess grandmaster in history when he died in 2000 at age 90. He donated his chess library to the Portland Chess Club and remained an active member. His life inspired the book Grandmaster from Oregon by Casey Bush.