Richard Réti

Richard Réti (1889-1929) was an accomplished chess player and author. He was, as Reuben Fine wrote: 'The most persuasive exponent of the hypermodern school....Although he never was a serious challenger to Capablanca, he was invariably a high prize-winner throughout the 1920's. The chess world suffered a great loss when he died at a relatively young age' [Reuben Fine, The World's Great Chess Games (2012), 121.]

Rudolf Spielmann, in his obituary of Réti in L’Echiquier for 1929, wrote: ‘Perhaps his strength did not reside so much in the discovery of a new move or of a tactical finesse hitherto unknown as in a new strategy. Very frequently and only after a few moves, I would find myself settling down against him with a lost position without knowing exactly how it could possibly have happened’[Réti’s  Games of Chess, Chosen and Annotated by H. Golombek (New York: Dover Publications, 1974), 4].

Réti was highly regarded and his contributions, valued. Golombek wrote: ‘This premature death was a tragedy for the chess-world, but it should be stated that, had he written only Modern Ideas in Chess he would still have belonged to the chess immortals.’  Golombek’s Encyclopedia of Chess, ed. Henry Golombek (New York: Crown Publishers, 1977), 275.

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