Loser's POV: Szymon Winawer (1878-1883)

Our eighth and final quarterfinalist has now been decided. For those of you who missed the previous vote (see here), Chigorin technically scored the second "upset" (using seeding as a measure) of the round of 16, moving on and letting us explore the life of his very experienced opponent.

Szymon (Simon) Abramowicz Winawer was born on 6 March 1838 in Warsaw. Relatively little is known about his childhood—his father was a rather successful alcohol merchant who provided for Szymon and his fourteen(!) siblings, while his mother detested chess and likely prevented it from being played under her roof. No records of Winawer's chess activities appeared until he was about 20, at which point he was already married and not far off from expecting his first son. Warsaw chess was doing rather well due to the efforts of the celebrated Russian master Alexander Petrov, with plenty of coffeehouses housing strong players for sparring after a day of work (Winawer, like many of his siblings, continued the merchant trade).

Winawer wouldn't actually have any games of his published until 1867, but even those were preceded by his puzzles; he, too, found minor fame as a problem composer before anything related to playing. Here's one from early that year (courtesy of, like much of the biographical material, Lissowski and Bogdanovich's The Wizard of Warsaw):

White Mates in 3

A few months later was the celebrated Paris 1867 tournament (I wrote about this around 3 years ago, see here), which has a funny story involving Winawer. While touring the Exhibition, he met Samuel Rosenthal, a fellow Pole (and allegedly Winawer's cousin) who had fled to France during the failed January Uprising earlier in the decade. Leopold Hoffer recounted—in his sketch of Winawer in The Chess-Monthly—the following dialogue:

If only Morphy had actually played in Paris (or any other tournament for that matter). Anyway, Rosenthal later hosted Winawer at his home, offering him the odds of a Knight and losing both games. When they met in the tournament, Rosenthal only managed a single draw from their two games. That was how they played chess in Paris.

Winawer famously finished in second, only a point behind Kolisch; the final game (a loss against tail-ender Eugene Rousseau) was subject to some scrutiny and accusations of foul play, but if the clock times were accurate (Winawer apparently spent 30 minutes for his 52 moves), they point to a much simpler and more obvious explanation.

Moving into the 1870s, he was a welcome competitor in various tournaments, chief among them his second-place finish at Paris 1878 (see Zukertort's perspective here). Lesser known was his visit to St. Petersburg in 1875, where he exchanged games with the strongest players (including Chigorin, but also Ilya Shumov, Emmanuel Schiffers, and Semion Alapin) and even won a tournament held amongst them. The following game—given by simaginfan in the comments of the last blog—is attributed to this tournament on the chessgames.com website, but as Chigorin himself wrote that none of the games were recorded, I suspect it was a more casual encounter.

It's still good fun, is it not?

Finally, the 1880s were a very topsy-turvy time for Winawer. After losing a short match against Adolf Schwarz (+1-3), he managed only eighth out of 16 at Wiesbaden with 9/15. 1881 saw him finish =3rd with Chigorin at Berlin (scoring 10.5/16), while Vienna 1882 was the first time he "won" an international tournament, sharing first with Steinitz (see Winawer's perspective here). When he failed to win a prize at London 1883, it looked like his career was over; were it not for a coinci-dental encounter at Nuremberg, his best result may never have happened (see here for his win and for an explanation of the pun).

Winawer indeed retired after this, not playing any tournaments until 1892 (which we'll cover later). His reputation was so great that, when choosing his opponent for his second World Championship match at the end of the decade, Steinitz seriously considered Winawer; the latter was afflicted with an eye infection at the time, and thus couldn't take up the mantle, but his importance in the chess world could not be understated.

Opening

Winawer carved out his niche in the openings where he could trade a Bishop for a Knight early, like in the Spanish or Rossolimo Sicilian. The weakened structure gave him an "extra" pawn, which he either used as a lever to accelerate an attack, or direct his play in the resulting endgame. Amusingly, his namesake Winawer French was very uncommonly played by him; the one I show is the only instance (to my knowledge) where 4. e5 was played.

Middlegame

It's the middlegame where I think Winawer is more misunderstood than most other players. His openings were sometimes derided as being unscientific and against respected theory, which is sometimes true; conversely, his endgames were often quite praised, which is very true (as we'll see next). But as far as his middlegames are concerned, Winawer is often considered a one-dimensional but very sharp attacker, like most people not named Steinitz (and sometimes Paulsen) from this era.

I will make a potentially controversial statement and claim that Winawer had a very similar style as Paul Morphy: both were positional players at heart, and after sufficiently outplaying their opponents, the combinations for which they're famous were the easy part of the game (Morphy was doubtlessly the stronger of the two, but qualitatively, I think my argument has merit). When going through his games for this section, I was actually quite amused at how often Winawer got a promising attacking position, but then fumbled the conversion one or more times. I'll leave those examples for a future blog, perhaps.

To the credit of those who consider Winawer an attacker, I will add that he loved to sacrifice (who doesn't?), but what's interesting is how many of his sacrifices were of a primarily positional nature. The difference between tactical and positional "combinations" (to use his contemporaries' vocab) wasn't really appreciated at the time, nor was the general concept of imbalances, but this knowledge gap was precisely what Winawer took advantage of game after game.

Endgame

Even as far back as Paris 1867, Winawer was considered one of the strongest endgame players in the world, a trait that didn't go away with time. He was especially fond of the Knight vs. Bishop endgame, as his opening quirk would indicate, but his deep positional understanding made him dangerous with any type or amount of material on the board.

Conclusion

Winawer is such a fun player to write about, this was great. Lissowski and Bogdanovich have singled out quite a few games from the 90s as well, so if we do this again for my 90s wrap-up, there will be even more goodies in store.

With that, we're done with Winawer, and the round of 16. Our first quarterfinal match will see two students of Steinitz square off: Burn vs. Zukertort. Let's see what happens.

Cheers