Comet Charousek

Submitted by RobertABrown on Sat, 12/15/2007 at 3:24pm.

Today Chess is not accorded much respect and little coverage in Canada. In the fifties and sixties things were even worse. Every Canadian newspaper had a daily bridge column, yet chess columns were as scarce as hens’ molars.

Television was the big technological breakthrough in those days. Computing technology was in diapers, and the Internet wasn’t even a twinkle in a programmer’s eye. As a consequence, finding out what was afoot in the world of international chess demanded some considerable effort on the part of a west coast kid with a powerful hankering to know more about the game.

I was afforded glimpses of what was going down in European tournaments thanks to the back issues of The Illustrated London News that piled up on a shelf of my school library, unread by everyone save for the Anglocentric librarian, Mr. McMaster, and me. While I’m sure he read the glossy journal from cover to cover, I quickly thumbed to the back of the British equivalent of Life Magazine, found Harry Golombek’s chess column, and scribbled down the games printed therein the back of my Math notebook.

Later I learned that a weekly column penned by Leonard Barden could be found on the thin, onion-skinned pages of the overseasedition of the Manchester Guardian, which I found at the main branch of the public library.

The same library had some chess books too. For the most part they were British publications and, invariably, they were out on loan. Britain had no grandmasters in those days. The British Chess Renaissance, and the slew of publications that appeared entrain, were almost two decades down the road.

The local bookstores offered a few titles, mostly of the chess-made-simple variety, but there were also some books from Fred Reinfeld’s vast oeuvre. From the latter source, I acquired a collection of Tarrasch’ games, paid for with wages earned through the sweaty labour of mowing of many lawns.

I also saved for, and bought, The Treasury of Chess Lore, complete with articles on chess playing automatons, the career of Paul Morphy,and all manner of chess eclecticism. Republished in that work was a gripping short story by one Kester Svendson that captured the drama of crucial game between an old master and a fictional Soviet phenom. The title of the story was The Last Round. At the end of it, editor Reinfeld wrote that the piece was based on a game played in 1898 between Charousek and Wolner He then gave the moves in descriptive notation. Iset up my men and ran through the game. 1. P-K4 P-K4 2. P-Q4 …

Who was this guy Rudolf Charousek? From the small sample I had, one thing was clear; the fellow had aflair for attacking chess.

Over the years I bumped into Rudolf Charousek in game anthologies. The story was always the same: bareknuckle chess with Rudolf prevailing on the strength of his superior attacking skills. The following game, played between Charousek a gentleman named Englander, in a tournament played the Hungarian city of Kaschau in 1892, was typical.

As near as I could tell, Englander and Wolner were not exactly heavyweights. How had Charousek done against the great masters of that era?

Many years later, the World Wide Web made it easy to find the answer to that question, and to learn much more about the formerly obscure chess master. I discovered that Rudolf Charousek wasn't Rudolf at all but Rezso, and his last name wasn't pronounced CHAR-oo-sek but Kah – ROO –sek.

I also learned that he was born in the small Hungarian town of Praga on the 19September 1873 into a family of Hungarian Jews. I was astonished to discover that he learned to play chess at the surprisingly advanced age of 16, and that soon after that he was vanquishing all comers. By the last decade of the 19^th Century, the meteoric Charousek was battling the best in the world. At his peak, retro ratings by Chess Metrics list him in seventh spot, only a few rating points behind players like Lasker,Pillsbury, and Tarrasch, but well ahead of Steinitz, Chigorn and other chess luminaries.

After a defeat at the hands of the talented Hungarian, the great Emmanuel Lasker is reputed to have predicted that he would be playing the young Charousek for the worldChampionship one day. It was not to be, however.

All the greatpandemics –swine flu, small pox, and the like – have been passed to humans by animals thanks to animal husbandry. One of the worst – and one that was still a significant medical concern back when I first read of Charousek – is tuberculosis or TB. Immunization programs have reduced the threat of TB to the point where many health authorities are no longer vaccinating children against it. Prominent medical researchers have stated that this is foolish since there are now strains of tuberculosis that are resistant to antibiotics. TB is still scarily prominent in the Inuit populations in Canada’s north. The possibility of another TB pandemic is possible.

When Lasker played Charousek, TB, the same disease that killed Franz Schubert and John Keats,(to name but two of its prominent victims,) was a major Health concern. Shortly after that game, Charousek contracted it. In 1900, at the age of 26 he died after a chess career of one decade.

Before he succumbed to the dreaded disease, Charousek had defeated most of the best players in the world. He had a plus score against Lasker, and his career was ascendant. There is enough evidence to suggest that Lasker’s prophesy may well have come to pass if young Charousek had found a wealthy backer for a match with the world champion.

Charousek’s legacy is a collection games numbering about 300. Many of them masterpieces of attacking play.