Loser's POV: Curt von Bardeleben (1881-1889)

My Windows got corrupted while I was writing this chapter, and among the things I lost were the games and misc. resources used in this blog series. This chapter is mostly unaffected, but expect an even longer gap between posts than usual while I recoup all of my losses.

For the first time, the democratic process has contradicted William Sonneborn's calculations, and an "upset" has taken place (find out what the heck I'm talking about here and the subject of the aforementioned vote here). Berthold Englisch received the majority of the votes and thus moves on, while once more we give his antagonist a closer look.

Curt von Bardeleben was born in Berlin on 31 January 1861 (making him the youngest person in our tournament) into an aristocratic family. He was something of a chess prodigy, learning the game at about 10 years old and quickly becoming quite consumed by it, as he revealed in an 1895 interview with The Sketch: "I soon grew very fond of the game, and nearly all the time I could spare from my lessons was given to chess... I, like others, have some wasted hours to look back upon. But school-boys will waste their time, whatever you may do, and, even regarded as a mode of squandering precious moments, chess has its compensations."

It's a shame that relatively little has been written about this man outside of his famous loss to Steinitz—I won't discuss it here, but all of the information you could ever want about this game can be found in one of Edward Winter's consistently detailed breakdowns here (importantly, the myth of him storming out of the playing hall without resigning is mostly debunked). Of his non-chess exploits, a lot of attention is given to his string of marriages in the early 1900s (allegedly to rich women looking to "buy" his baron title) and how his (potential) suicide in 1924 was the inspiration for Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin in Vladimir Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense. Again, curious parties can look elsewhere for more detailed breakdowns of these trivia bits.

Before he was known solely as yet another ungracious loser with a poor temper, he was looked upon as a bright star for the future of German chess, and that's the side of "CvB" that we'll be focusing on today.

CvB won his master title at the Hauptturnier of the Berlin 1881 congress, and followed this up by winning the "Vizayanagaram" tournament in London 1883 (see here). His master tournament debut took place only two weeks later, where his fifth place finish at Nuremberg was a very fine indicator of things to come. Unfortunately for the chess world, he then took the next four years off to complete his law school training, during which time he contributed to the Hamburg 1885 tournament book (he would ultimately pursue journalism as a career over law, contributing to more tournament books and annotating games in the Deutsche Schachzeitung).

He returned to the fold in 1887, now fully educated and apparently well-practiced. He continued posting strong results at the German tournaments, finishing clear fourth at Frankfurt 1887 and =4th at Breslau 1889. His best year, I reckon, was in between these two events: in 1888, he finished =3rd at Bradford (winning his first six games in a row before slowing down in the second half), and =1st with Fritz Riemann at a smaller tournament in Leipzig (Riemann's perspective, along with many other games, can be found here). A couple of his games were published but never made it into the database, and I give them below; two others can be found on the chessgames website here and here.

By the time this blog is published, those games should have been uploaded to the chessgames website.

As far as CvB's introductory decade shows, he was a very promising player who could have (before Breslau) claimed to be the strongest player in Germany—a far cry from the one-hit-wonder many consider him. Socially, he was seen as "an accomplished gentleman, modest in demeanour, of prepossessing manners," according to The Chess-Monthly, again contradicting the modern narrative of him being a generally poor sport (that accusation isn't entirely without merit, but it's again a discussion for another day).

Returning to the chess, let's take a look at a few more games, so we may get a more complete understanding of this oft-misunderstood master.

Opening

Bardeleben was probably this decade's most consistent practitioner of 1. d4, favouring Zukertort-esque setups in his early days, and transitioning to primarily Queen's Gambits later on. He did play his fair share of 1. e4, primarily essaying the Vienna in Open Games; he and Jaques Mieses both developed a lot of the early theory in the King's Indian Attack setup. What struck me the most about his Black openings was how often he fianchettoed, either in a straight-up Modern (as shown further below), or with this Queen's Indian type setup I present below (I never found this system super convincing, but the Bishop's role at the end of the game can't be denied).

Middlegame

In their biography of him, The Chess-Monthly described CvB as "calm, cautious, and confident even in trying circumstances," and elsewhere described a technical middlegame as "just the sort of game which Bardeleben plays to perfection." I admit that discerning someone's personality from their games is not my specialty, so I can't speak to his personal traits. They presented a handful of his games to pair with his biography, and I give my favourite middlegames here, so you can make your own judgment. The impression I get is that CvB was a very objective player; he knew what resources were available out of the opening, and he brought his forces into service to best exploit any advantages.

Endgame

I only have one game for this section, as this was where I had worked up to when I lost all of my stuff. It's a very fun game with many fun moments, so hopefully that makes up for the lack of variety. If I have the time and energy later on, I'll try to add one or two more examples, because Bardeleben was, like everyone else on this list, a perfectly fine endgame player.

Conclusion

I apologize for the inconsistent nature of this post; it should come as no surprise that I didn't want this to happen, but here we are. The next match, between Blackburne and Paulsen, was already going to take quite some time as it's one I really want to do correctly. I will do it, and hopefully I will indeed do it correctly, but we'll see exactly how long that'll take.

Thank you for your continued support. Cheers