“I'm now 71, a retired banker, and live in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a Minneapolis suburb. My two children have grown up and graduated from university, while my wife still works about 60 hours/week as a commercial architect.“

Steve has represented the USA on the first board in all four Olympic finals in which they have participated since 2012, including the 22nd Olympiad, which is coming to an end. Since then, his rating has remained constant at around 2580 with minor changes. It would be hard to imagine greater stability. However, his trademark is not calm positional play, as one might easily assume, but thorough knowledge of variations and analysis, both of which, unlike in over-the-board chess, can be associated with a high draw rate in correspondence chess and indeed apply to many top players who maintain their ranking in the top 100 over a long period of time. Over the years, he has limited the number of rated correspondence chess games he plays simultaneously to about 20 per year. The fact that he currently has almost 30 is an exception.

Steve learned chess at the age of 8. Growing up in a rural area in the 1960s where there were no chess clubs, he started playing correspondence chess at the age of 12. He didn't have much time for it alongside school and university, but he remained loyal to his hobby despite modest progress. At around the age of 30, he finally realised that he was playing too much 'safety first' and needed to change his style if he wanted to improve.
“I therefore made a conscious effort to improve my ability to calculate tactically by studying GM level games in depth. Simultaneously, I abandoned many of my opening preferences in favor of more aggressive lines.

So for the next 5 years I studied on my own and sensed improvement. During this time I played hundreds of speed chess games on my lunch break at work with the MN. State Chess Champion; we shared the same employer.“ (http://jfcampbell.us/CampbellReport/ham/ham.htm)

The creative break from correspondence chess paid off, and Steve managed to establish himself among the best correspondence chess players in the USA in the 1990s. At the end of 1999, he accepted the challenge of playing two correspondence chess matches with colour changes against the chess programmes Nimzo 7.32 and Fritz 6. Three of the games ended in a draw. Nimzo 7.32 won its white game. Steve's detailed analyses can be found in the Campbell Report already cited.

After winning the GM title in 2010, Steve achieved further GM norms; his fifth and currently last one dates from 2023.