Emanuel Lasker was a German chess player, mathematician and chess player, world chess champion from 1894 to 1921. Emanuel learned the game from his brother in 1889 and soon revealed enough talent to allow him to increase his income by playing cards and chess at Café Kaiserhof in Berlin. That year he won the annual Café Kaiserhof tournament and also the Hauptturnier A tournament. With this victory he was awarded the title of Master, which allowed him to participate in high-level tournaments both in Germany and abroad.
That same year he began to establish himself as one of the strongest players on the European chess scene. In addition to his tournament victories, Lasker played several matches against the best players of the period including Joseph Blackburne. According to Chessmetrics Lasker became the world's strongest player in the mid-1890s. Lasker publicly challenged Siegbert Tarrasch, who had won three consecutive major tournaments, but Tarrasch refused, stating that Lasker would first have to prove his worth. After receiving Tarrasch's refusal, Lasker directly challenged world champion Wilhelm Steinitz. Initially Lasker had problems finding sponsors and funds to organize the match, also due to the restrictions placed by Steinitz. In the end the purse for the players was 2,000 dollars each, lower than that earned by Steinitz on previous occasions, however the reigning champion was going through a moment of financial difficulty and was in desperate need of money, therefore he agreed to play anyway, trying to pass it off as a gesture of sportsmanship on his part.
The 1894 world championship was played in New York, Philadelphia and Montreal and the conditions of the match stipulated that the first to reach ten victories would win the match. Before the start of the match Steinitz had declared that he would win without a doubt, so Lasker's victory in the opening match was a big surprise. The reigning champion equalized in the second game and the situation remained balanced until the sixth game in which the score was 2-2. At that point Lasker won five consecutive games to reach 7-2, putting Steinitz in crisis who asked for a week's rest due to too much fatigue. Upon returning from the break, Steinitz seemed to have recovered and began to play better, drawing the first game and winning the next two, but Lasker regained all the advantage in the fifteenth and sixteenth games and in the nineteenth game he closed the matter 10-5 with four draws, becoming the second officially recognized world champion.
After the match many commentators criticized Lasker's victory; in particular Tarrasch stated that the German had won only because Steinitz was now old (he was 58 years old at the start of the match). Two years after the first world challenge the new champion granted a rematch to his predecessor, however on this second occasion Steinitz was now close to his sunset and revealed himself to be clearly inferior to his opponent. Lasker won the first four games putting a serious claim on the title and eventually won 10-2 with 5 draws. Lasker's results in matches between 1896–97 and 1914 were overwhelming: he won all but one match, defending his title several times. After winning the rematch with Steinitz he faced Marshall in the 1907 match, despite his aggressive style the American was unable to win a single match compared to Lasker's eight victories (in 15 matches, final score 11.5−3, 5).
The following year he challenged the German Tarrasch in Düsseldorf and Munich. The board gave an indisputable verdict: in the first five games Lasker won four times, often playing moves that Tarrasch did not understand. The most striking example was in the second game, in which after 19 moves Lasker found himself one pawn down, with a blocked bishop and two doubled pawns. Tarrasch was sure he had the game in hand, but in the following moves Lasker revealed his game plans and by the thirty-ninth move the situation for Tarrasch was so compromised that he had to abandon the game. Lasker won the match 8-3 in 16 games. Tarrasch, not admitting defeat, blamed his defeat on the humid climate which had compromised his health. In 1910 Lasker faced the Austrian Carl Schlechter. Schlechter's sportsmanship led him to accept scandalous conditions to say the least for the challenge: in fact in the 1910 world championship the challenger was required to overtake the champion by two points to win the title, therefore the reigning champion would have retained the world crown even in case of defeat by one point. The condition, already profoundly unfair in itself, was further aggravated by the brevity of the match: only 10 games. Schlechter, against all odds, started very well, putting Lasker in great difficulty and leading 1-0 in the fifth game. After four draws the Viennese chess player found himself in the last game in the paradoxical situation of being ahead by one point but forced to win anyway. The Austrian ventured into a bold management of the Slavic defense (D11), but Lasker's defense held.
Feeling forced to win at all costs to reach the required score, Schlechter rejected (or did not see) a way to obtain a drawn position. So that, slowly but surely, the champion managed to assert his material advantage, winning the match and drawing the match. As per the agreements made, Lasker thus retained the title with full rights. In the same year Lasker granted the rematch to Janowski, on this occasion there was no doubt that the world title was at stake. Lasker won even more clearly by eight to zero in just 11 games.
In 1911 Lasker received the challenge of the rising Cuban star José Raúl Capablanca, however the reigning champion did not want to play a ten-victory match in the tropical climatic conditions of Havana, especially considering the fact that draws had become more frequent and the match risked being very long indeed. Lasker made a counter-proposal, which replicated the original conditions of the match against Schlechter, i.e. the double advantage of the challenger and a limit of thirty games (or six victories, but always with the condition of overcoming the opponent by two points). He also demanded that the challenger provide a grant of $20,000. In a letter dated December 20, 1911, Capablanca wrote to Lasker his objections to the champion's proposals, and in his response Lasker put an end to the negotiations.
The following year Lasker began negotiations with Akiba Rubinstein, whose results in recent tournaments made him the most credible contender for the title. The two players reached an agreement, but the challenger was unable to raise the sufficient sum and therefore the challenge never took place. The outbreak of the First World War put an end to any possibility of having a world championship match. In January 1920 Lasker and José Raúl Capablanca signed an agreement to fight for the world title in 1921. In August 1920 Capablanca and Lasker met in Holland and the champion agreed to fight on two conditions: to be considered the challenger and not the champion and the possibility of renouncing the title in the event of his victory. After a ten-year gestation the match was played between March and April 1921, the first four games ended in a draw, in the fifth Lasker made a serious mistake with black and lost. After four more draws in the tenth Capablanca prevailed in a pawn endgame. Capablanca hit two more hits in the eleventh and fourteenth to take a 4-0 lead after 14 games. At that point Lasker complained of health problems and abandoned the match, handing the world title to the Cuban.
Lasker commented on the tournament as follows: "This match, which gave me difficulties like no other, was a chess pleasure for me. Extrinsic circumstances were truly unfavorable to me but Capablanca's game posed legitimate problems for me. His moves are clear, logical and vigorous, there is nothing hidden or artificial about them, you can sense his thoughts in them, even when he would like to be cunning. Whether he plays to win, to draw or is afraid of losing, his moves clearly show what he feels. With all this , if his moves are transparent, they are not at all easy to find and sometimes they are profound. Capablanca does not like complications or adventures: he prefers to know where to go first. His depth is not that of a poet, but that of a mathematician , its spirit is Roman, not Greek. The combinations of Anderssen and Čigorin were created in particular situations, in which their individual characters were manifested; those of Capablanca can be foreseen several moves in advance, because they are based on general principles of the game". Lasker is known for his "psychological" approach to chess: choosing a theoretically inferior move in order to make his opponent's game uncomfortable. Famous in this sense is his match against Capablanca, transcribed below in Italian algebraic notation, in which Lasker played a quiet match with White, a substitution variant of the Spanish match. Probably convinced he was winning a draw, Capablanca played passively and fell into a disadvantageous position which led to his defeat.
