team, ahead of 13-year-old Bobby Fischer, who was on second board. Whitaker drew a match against the elderly German Grandmaster Friedrich Samisch in 1960. Recognized as International Master Physics Professor at Marquette University, Dr. Arpad Elo (himself a strong Master chess player), who designed first the American and then the worldwide rating systems for competitive chess, gave Whitaker a rating of 2420 in his authoritative 1978 work The Rating of Chess Players, Past and Present. This represents a very strong Master level. Chessmetrics gives him a peak rating of 2568 in 1928, and shows him as No. 25 in the world in 1918. The Chessmetrics group retrospectively determines Master-level historical chess performances on a worldwide basis. The United States was among the first nations to implement a formalized national rating system, based on mathematical statistics methods, for chess performances, but this did not take place until the 1940s. International chess ratings were introduced by FIDE in 1970, while formalized international titles for chess performances were introduced by FIDE in 1950. After more than ten years of campaigning, Whitaker was finally awarded the International Master title by FIDE in 1965, based on his several strong tournament results from decades earlier. Certainly, his competitive results from Atlantic City 1921 and Kalamazoo 1927, against strong fields, were at the IM level. It was far from unusual for FIDE to take many years to resolve similar situations for historical chess champions from around the world. In his later years, he was usually listed by the USCF as a Master Emeritus, but in January 1972 (when he was age 81), Chess Life magazine listed his rating as 2142. A threshold rating of 2200 indicates National Master playing standard in the United States. Later life and death The last years of his life were spent driving around the country in his Volkswagen Beetle, playing in weaker-field chess tournaments in the Southern United States that he could potentially win. In 1961, he was involved in a serious automobile accident in Arkansas in which his friend and co-author Glenn Hartleb was killed, but Whitaker still continued to compete actively in chess until shortly before his death in 1975 at the age of 85, in Phenix City, Alabama. Playing style Grandmaster Arnold Denker, with co-author Larry Parr, characterized Whitaker as a very strong tactical player, and he won many games this way against even the strongest players living in