etymology - Non-chess usage of "patzer"?

I've heard the word patzer used to describe an incompetent or amateurish chess player. Is it ever used in a non-chess context?

Answer

Yes, patzer evidently is (or at least has been) sometimes used in a nonchess context, as we see in this excerpt from Victor Niederhoffer, The Education of a Speculator (1998):

As I trust has become abundantly clear by now, I have followed all my father's advice as closely as the Greeks followed the Delphic oracle. While I was courting the future Mrs. Niederhoffer, who not only understood my profession but helped to create it as my assistant, I figured I should expose her to the board games as a litmus test. I took her to the game tables at Washington Square Park, where I had played many games with my father as a boy. I prevailed on Susan to wait while I tried to get a game. Traditionally, veteran checkers players at the park won't play with a stranger because they don't want to waste time on a "patzer." I asked a number of players for a game, but they all refused. Finally, someone said, "Junior will play you."

So patzer has been used, in essentially the same sense, in both chess and checkers. Venturing even farther afield, we find this, in ISLA, volume 8 (1974) [combined snippets]:

I spent much of my time on the tennis courts. For those who grudgingly shell out $20 or $30 an hour for indoor courts. in New Yok, St. Croix is a patzer's paradise. There are some fine courts available at several hotels—the Buccaneer, St. Croix-by-the-Sea, the Caribbean ReefClub—and there is a lovely new tennis club high on Mount Royal.

But in the vast majority of instances, the milieu is chess, and most slang and idiom dictionaries focus on that angle. For, example, John Ayto, Oxford Dictionary of Slang (1999) has this entry for the term, under the category heading "Chess":

patzer (1959) Applied to a weak player; origin uncertain; compare German patzen bungle [Example:] Daily Telegraph: So Fischer after besting off a ferocious attack ...'played like a patzer', said one American Grandmaster, 'went to sleep on the job' said another. (1972)

And from Harold Wentworth & Stuart Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang (1960):

patzer n. An inferior chess player. Although said to be from the Yiddish, there is no Yiddish, German, or Hebrew word or word combination to suggest it. Prob. from "patsy" with the familiar"—er" ending added.

Robert Chapman, New Dictionary of American Slang (1986), however, is less inclined to write off the possible connection to Yiddish:

patzer or potzer n A mediocre but often enthusiastic chess player {probably fr Yiddish; see potsky [defined in the book under an entry for "potchkie or potchky or potsky" as "To putter; tinker; =MESS"]}

The earliest mention of the term that I've been able to find is from the American Mercury, volume 20 (1930) [combined snippets:

I was then the queer little shaver who earned his livelihood by playing anyone and everyone at so much a game at akl hours of the day and night. One thing that attracted me to the East Side was the fact that most men earned there living in just the same way. Another thing — most of the men were older than I, much older, some of them patriarchs. Still another—they were cultivated. When we weren't playing or talking chess, we talked about music and books: I went to school over there. And I learned philosophy without calling it such. We had no abstract words for what we felt and thought. When we wearied of talk, "Let's have another game—" there was always that. And no one was so hard up that there wasn't someone worse off. I remember the proprietor of a chess cafe who let the addicts sleep on or under tables overnight. I remember a potzer too proud for such beds. If he lost instead of won, he'd sleep on park benches. None of us found that out till he died on one. Then we chipped in to save him from Potter's Field. A witty fellow he was; none wittier over there over there where wit is an essential weapon to losers.

I couldn't confirm the date of this publication, but 1930 was indeed the year that volume 20 of the American Mercury was published, and I'm inclined to accept the dating of this article as probably accurate. If it is, patzer/potzer is at least 29 years older than Ayto gives it credit for being—and the setting of the reported events (Second Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan) and the spelling potzer add a bit more support to the notion that patzer was derived from a Yiddish word.