How I Turned My Chess.com Blog Into A Book!

I started my chess blog, really, because I couldn’t figure out what else to do during the dead time of a day. Some people, I suppose, apply makeup, or scroll on social media, or listen to podcasts, but, when I was waiting for a train or something like that, I couldn’t think of anything better than to play through historical chess games.

Eventually, this tremendous waste of time turned into a more constructive waste of time. I was spending so much time on Chess.com, watching my rating never really tick upwards, that I figured I’d be better off by putting that energy instead into a chess history blog.

The idea with “A Century of Chess” was to begin in 1900 and work my way forward through chess history, like what GM Garry Kasparov did in his classic My Great Predecessors—my version would just be much dorkier and more neurotic.

I suspect that most people reading this don’t think all that much about chess history, which is as much of a niche within chess as chess is a niche within life. But chess history is a unique, and enchanting, window into the game.

First of all, the ideas that you play in your blitz games, even what supercomputers advocate in their analyses, were worked out at some point in time, by some human or other, in the ever-unfolding theoretical evolution of chess. And, second, chess is something more than a board game (however absorbing), and in the blog and now book (!), A Century of Chess, I wanted to lay out my theory of the game.

What I believed was that chess was an art just as much as music or literature, and that the great masters deserved to be studied the way great artists are—in the evolution of their style, in what they contributed to their art form—but that to really understand the masters involved meant not just playing over world championship matches or a handful of much-anthologized classic games, but really digging into the wider context of their era. I thought this project of mine might well turn into a final shunning of human contact, some half-delirious spiraling down into the labyrinths of chess history, but it turned out to be very chill, a nice respite from my other work, and an introduction to a very pleasant community in the Chess.com blogosphere (which ye on the Chess.com homepage may not even know exists)!

In terms of setting this up, I am very grateful to NM Sam Copeland and Colin Stapczynski of Chess.com who gave space to the blog; to @simaginfan, @kamalakanta, @Zoran5, and others of the blogging community who are as obsessed with chess history as I am, and to those who have over time have contributed comments and analysis, as well as the occasional song and poem!

What the blog represented, also, was a chance to keep company with some long-gone figures. What I find enthralling about chess, almost more than anything else, is its ability to preserve thought across time. When somebody writes text, they do so in, let’s say, the ease of their study, with plenty of opportunities to revise, but when we play over the final game from the Lasker–Schlechter match of 1910, we can feel deep within ourselves the nervous tension the players were experiencing, can almost hear Carl Schlechter’s heart racing as he uncorked 35…Rxf4, the gallant, fatal exchange sacrifice that cost him the world championship.

I started to find myself really enjoying the company of the masters. Each one had his own aesthetic and his inner world; each one represented a different philosophy of chess; each one (it seemed) had his own distinct tragedy.

There was Emanuel Lasker, the greatest player of the era, playing in a wry, tenacious, dogfighting style that no one else could understand—and who, outside of chess, would never earn the intellectual respect that he so desperately craved.

There was Siegbert Tarrasch, the epitome of correctness both in his manners and in his chess style—who had something close to the ideal bourgeois life until all three of his sons died in quick succession to one another.

There was Harry Pillsbury, charming, handsome, superlatively talented—who would die at age 33, never fully realizing all his powers.

And there was Schlechter, so gentle, so chivalrous—who died, in some accounts, of starvation.

I enjoyed everything about writing the blog—the game annotations, the write-ups, the research, the comments from the blogging community—and then I was lucky enough to be connected to IM Cyrus Lakdawala and FM Carsten Hansen, who wanted to publish it as a book through CarstenChess. The book, A Century of Chess: Book 1: 1900-1909, is basically a consolidated version of the blog, with higher-level game annotations by Cyrus and Carsten than I am able to provide, and the book format provides a much more coherent, manageable narrative than the blog does.

In it, the threads of this period more clearly emerge. There’s the acme of classicism around 1900—the supremely-logical, harmonious style of play of Tarrasch, Pillsbury, Schlechter, and Geza Maroczy, which is still what most chess players are introduced to as they’re learning the game. And then, little by little, complexity and paradox are introduced into the orderly chess world.

In the thick of classicism, a Neo-Romantic style emerged with the unruly American Frank Marshall and the buccaneering Pole David Janowsky. In 1905, a whole new generation burst onto the chess scene, emphasizing a stormy, anxious style of play. Many of these masters—Rudolf Spielmann, Savielly Tartakower, Aron Nimzowitsch, Oldrich Duras, Ossip Bernstein, etc—would dominate chess for years to come. By the late 1900s, two new players emerged, Akiba Rubinstein and Jose Raul Capablanca. They brought classical chess to an almost undreamt-of, computer-like perfection. And, throughout it all, there was Lasker, playing in his mysterious style, which wouldn’t really have disciples until a full half-century later, and who was all-but-untouchable even to the greatest of his rivals.

As the book is published, there’s also something a little sad about it for me. I’ve very much enjoyed spending so much time in this particular chunk of history. It’s before World War I, back when a tragedy the level of World War I was entirely unimaginable. It’s an era of tremendous, almost limitless optimism; of gentlemanly sensibilities; of a belief in art for its own sake. The settings are often European spas or elegant Monte Carlo casinos, or jubilee celebrations of the European monarchs—a whole world that was about to vanish, irrevocably.

If you do end up purchasing the book (!), or checking out the blog, I hope you enjoy the taste of this era as much as I have. The series is, yes, continuing through the rest of the 20th century, if not beyond. But after this, it’s a much more challenging, more difficult time, in which chess, too, undergoes its own profound evolution.