The Five Schools of Chess

The five schools

Let's start out with a little history. Starting in the mid-1800s, a school of thought called Romanticism began to take hold in the chess world. Romanticism is the philosophy of many players, that the king's flank is the most important. Romantic players often played for tactics alone, ignoring the center. In fact, winning came second to winning with style.

The Classical School

Then came the first World Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, who crushed his opponents with his deep positional understanding. He was the first modern master to impress upon his students the importance of the center. Some of his later disciples, including Tarrasch, Lasker, and Capablanca, went on to spread his beliefs about the center. Tarrasch was the leader of this school of thought, and was called "the father of Classical dogma".

The Hypermodern School

In the 1920s there was a revolution in chess. Several Central European players like Reti, Nimzowitsch, and Gruenfeld burst onto the chess scene to dominate chess during the next few decades. Their ideas formed the basis for the Hypermodern school. The idea was that a large pawn center would eventually overextend itself and become a target. Nimzowitsch in particular believed in the importance of piece play against the center. His legacy, the Nimzo-Indian Defense, is very popular today with the world's strongest grandmasters. It involves restraining the central pawns with pieces.

Russian Dynamism

During the 1930s Hypermodernism and Classical dogma often clashed with each other. Classical dogma was more popular than Hypermodernism, and eventually two openings threatened to dominate international chess: the Queen's Gambit Declined and the Ruy Lopez, both sound classical openings. In the end after Alekhine's death, a new generation of Soviet masters took hold, introducing a new philosophy regarding the center. Russian Dynamism, a blend of Hypermodernism, which stresses piece play, and Classicalism, which emphasized the pawn center, came with a welcome change to the Indian Defenses and the Sicilian Defense. Russian Dynamism said that it was okay to allow central pawn weaknesses for dynamic piece play. This brought with it a variety of new openings, such as the Boleslavsky Variation in the Sicilian Defense (1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 d6 6.Be2 e5!), which allows a hole on d5 in return for active play against the e4-pawn.

The Modern School

Essentially, the Modern school was introduced by Bobby Fischer. Fischer believed that a dose of all three schools was the correct approach to chess, and had wonderful games using all ideas, including his many great victories with the Najdorf Sicilian. Later world champions like Karpov and Kasparov built up on his work, leading to the present-day school of thought that all previous ideas were correct in their own way

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