Loser's POV: Emil Schallopp (1880-1889)

My last blog was very unfortunately timed, and as a result, not many people saw it (but you can, see here). Therefore, there's probably not a lot of people who knew Schallopp was even part of the last match. The vote obviously had a smaller turnout, but it was sufficiently decisive:

Alas, another Brit defeats another German. Mackenzie sails on to the second round, while we must now pay our respect to this match's runner-up.

Emil Schallopp was born on 1 August 1843 in Friesack, Germany. His passion for the literary arts was pronounced as early as in high school, where he was known to translate classic German poems into Latin, as well as compose his own in that same language. He began studying stenography at around 15, and from 1872 onward he was the chief of a "special Governmental Shorthand Bureau" in the Reichstag. 

Even in the chess world, Schallopp contributed more to the literature of the game than the practical play. He authored many books on the game, among them the tournament books for the Leipzig 1877 and Paris 1878 congresses, those of the first three German Chess Association meetings (Leipzig 1879, Berlin 1881, Nuremberg 1883), and the book of the Steinitz-Zukertort World Championship match. He was also chiefly responsible for the 7th edition of the most influential opening book of the day, the Handbuch des Schachspiels, released in 1891.

Schallopp began playing chess against strong opponents in the early 1860s, joining the Berlin Chess Society and regularly meeting established masters like Adolf Anderssen and Gustav Neumann. He was a regular competitor in the various regional German tournaments of the 60s and 70s, notably competing in the same Leipzig tournaments whose books he wrote. The Wiesbaden 1880 tournament was his first time facing international masters, and he performed admirably, finishing a half point behind the winners (Blackburne, Englisch and Schwarz all scored 11/15) to claim the fourth prize.

From there, Schallopp's results fluctuated, as you can infer from the table I posted here. His best events were a pair of second-place finishes at Hereford 1885 and Nottingham 1886, and he just barely made it into the money at Nuremberg 1883 and Hamburg 1885. Aside from those, he usually hovered at around a 50% score, and there were a couple of arguments given for this. The more sympathetic commentators mentioned that Schallopp was often doing his literary duties in the middle of games, which no doubt split his concentration. The more objective commentators (like me, hopefully) attribute this more to the fact that Schallopp's style never really changed from his "coffeehouse" days, where his wins were brilliant and his losses were equally spectacular. 

I think it's about time for some proper analysis, don't you?

Opening

Schallopp was among the more universal opening theoreticians of the day, as he had a good number of games in quite a few lines. Rather than have a preference for any particular openings, it seems like he chose a couple of openings per tournament and changed in between. For example, at Frankurt (and a little at Nottingham), he exclusively played the Exchange Spanish, whereas before he was partial to either the Nc3 or early d4 systems. This was true in other lines like the French—he played the Exchange pretty consistently until 1885, where he switched to the more modern Nc3 and e5 systems—and the Scotch—despite being a "gambit player," his Scotch games were never actually gambits until Breslau 1889. A similar story could be told about his Black openings, where he experimented in the Sicilian, Four Knights, some miscellaneous fianchetto openings against d4, etc. As far as lasting opening contributions are concerned, there exists a "Schallopp Defence" in the Slav, which I show below.

Middlegame

Despite not playing that many gambits, Schallopp was still firmly in the Romantic camp. The above two examples show a pretty typical progression of most of his games: the opening goes fine, he starts looking for ways to create action, and he either scores a pretty win or goes down in flames (draws were few and far between). One side effect of his vast opening knowledge, I would imagine, was that he could play the first few moves of any game quite quickly. Combine this with his aggressive tendencies, and he scored quite a few quick wins by virtue of his opponents going wrong right before the time control. I'll share a few of my favourite examples.

I would hardly be doing my duty if I didn't also show Schallopp's Brilliancy Prize win, which I previously showed in the London 1886 chapter (see here). It's not exactly the same as the above, since I don't think time trouble influenced Gunsberg's blunder quite as much (the time control was 20 moves per hour and the blunder happened at move 14), but it's just too awesome to not show again. All notes are taken straight from that chapter.

Endgame

If I had to rank the players discussed thus far, I would say that Schallopp was definitely a worse endgame player than Weiss, and arguably below Riemann as well. The problem with evaluating him is that relatively few of his games actually reached an endgame (or at least one worth analyzing). But among those games that did, Schallopp's true strength shone in endgames with imbalanced material; the asymmetry alone was enough to present tactical opportunities at every stage, and consolidating down into any sort of clarity was sometimes impossible. The two games below hopefully demonstrate this point, with the second one being the source of this chapter's thumbnail.

Conclusion

For those of you who would like to go through even more of Schallopp's games, simaginfan wrote another post on him (almost exactly five years ago) here. Either way, I hope today's discussion helped bring a little light to another one of history's underappreciated players. It was, as usual, very fun to write.

Our next matchup will be between two of the most active tournament players of the decade: Isidor Gunsberg and James Mason. It's arguably going to be the most entertaining match of the entire round, so I hope to see you there.