Romantic Rumble: Amos Burn vs. Fritz Riemann
In my last post (see here), we took a look at a prototype leaderboard-esque thing for the 1880s in a continuation of humanity's desire to rank things. I argued that the leaderboard had its flaws when it came to actually ranking people, but it served as a good way to choose and seed people for a much more interesting project:
How this new series will work: Each post will cover a new match, and we'll discuss a hypothetical head-to-head between the two players in our quest to answer "who was the best player in the 1880s?" At the end of the post, there will be a poll where you - yes, you, dear reader - will get to vote on who you think the better player was (when only that decade is considered, at least). The winner moves on to the next round, the loser will be the subject of my next blog; it'll be a tribute to the fallen, if you will. If all goes well, we can run this whole thing again once Winner's POV hits the end of the century (and I hit the end of my content... a bridge we'll cross later).
Without further ado, let's get into today's nonsense:
Romantic Rumble: Amos Burn vs. Fritz Riemann
When I was planning out the format of these posts, I imagined I would start by going over the games the two players actually played against each other. But do you want to know something funny? These two never played; Riemann's final tournament was Hamburg 1885 (where a penultimate-round win over Gunsberg nearly cost him the tournament, see here), Burn's first was London 1886 (see here).
With that option out the window, we'll instead take a look at how the players handled themselves in their games - their "style" if you prefer - and combine that with their respective results to inform our opinion of who was the better player. Sound good?
Fritz Riemann
Riemann was a student of Adolf Anderssen (both in chess and high school math), and it's very possible to detect traces of Anderssen's school of thought in some of the middlegame positions we'll be looking at. I think it's natural to divide our analysis into the usual phases of the game, so we'll examine this in conjunction with his opening (White and Black separately) and endgame play.
Opening (White): Riemann doubtlessly had a very good grasp of the Classical openings of the time - he worked extensively with Anderssen, who himself was a wealth of book knowledge, and he even contributed to the Evans Gambit chapter in the 6th edition of the Handbuch des Schachspiels (1880) - but he didn't really play them. On the rare occasion he played the Spanish, it was indeed Anderssen's system, but those were few and far between. He much preferred the Vienna, and even more often, the Center Game. My overall thesis is that Riemann put a very high emphasis on flexibility in his openings, often foregoing combat right out of the gate (and sometimes putting himself at a straight disadvantage) in order to get fully developed and search for those delicious combinations later into the middlegame.
Opening (Black): Against e4, Riemann was a much more Classical player, always responding with e5 and following more popular book lines. The same notion of flexibility still made its way into his play, as I think the game against Hermann von Gottschall really shows. But against other first moves, things become much more interesting. I make the claim that Fritz Riemann was the first master to regularly play the King's Indian - excepting the actual Indian players, like those from John Cochrane's 1850s expedition - and other similar openings. Viewing this from a modern lens, it makes perfect sense that a player who placed such importance on dynamic potential would favour such an opening; from the perspective of the 1880s, where Steinitz's ideas were finally becoming accepted as fact? Not so obvious. Riemann's repertoire was very unique, and we'll see a couple other games (both against James Mason, amusingly) where his creativity was allowed to shine.
Middlegame: If I had to describe the Anderssen school of play in a single word, I would have to say "optimism." It's a very common misconception that Anderssen was a coffeehouse, 'sac-now think-later' type of player - the chess equivalent of a caveman. This is primarily a result of his most famous games (the Immortal and Evergreen) being offhand games (which he put basically zero stock into) and his most famous serious contest being his demolition at the hands of Paul Morphy in 1858. We've covered many of his tournament games in previous posts (you can search them easily enough, but they're much older so I make no promises about the quality) that run contrary to this; Anderssen was just a good all-around chess master.
A claim that holds a little more water is that Anderssen was a combination-focused player. Prior to his success as a player, he found a little fame as a problem composer, and this almost guaranteed that the hunt for some flashy tactic would be baked into his development as a player. This naturally rubbed off on Riemann, but without the decades of practice to fall back on, the student required a little more optimism: he had to be optimistic his position leading up to the combination was sound; he had to be optimistic that the combination itself was sound; and even more importantly, if this wasn't being used as a knockout blow, he had to be optimistic that the position following the combination was actually better for him than just playing normally. The best example of this is in his 1885 encounter with Mason, where no amount of calculation (especially so close to the time control) could adequately prepare him for the dynamics of the resulting imbalanced position.
Endgame: Would it surprise you to hear that such a Romantic player as Riemann was actually very proficient in the endgame? It sure surprised me when I was initially compiling the games. I wouldn't put him in the same class as players like Blackburne and Tarrasch - those gentlemen were closer to endgame specialists than Riemann ever was - but compared to much of his cohort, he was relatively accurate. I attribute this to his optimism as well: if he continued playing, if he was pushing or had any semblance of an initiative, his opponents were bound to make a mistake. I have quite a few examples of Riemann somehow eliciting a one-move blunder out of his opponents in otherwise equal positions, and provide the two highest-profile scalps for your viewing pleasure.
That's quite a splendid collection, if I do say so myself. Next, onto the apparent #1 seed in this whole circus.
Amos Burn
Burn scoring as highly as he did in my last post is partly what inspired this series, as I don't believe some of Burn's performances were worth as many points as he received. That's not to say he wasn't a very good player, given he's the subject of three Winner's POV chapters (but who's counting?), but I'm quite curious to see how exactly he fares when compared directly with his peers. I guess Riemann can't exactly be considered his peer - they were both students of the previous generation (Burn took lessons from Steinitz before the latter moved to America) and that's about where the comparisons end - but there's a very nice contrast that this matchup provides, so let's explore.
Opening (before New York): One very amusing quirk of Burn's opening play was how differently it was before the New York 1889 tournament vs. during/after.
Initially, Burn's primary weapon as Black was the French Defence, in which he has a variation bearing his name (1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bg5 dxe4 is the Burn Variation). It was arguably a better fit for him than for Blackburne - considered to be its most dedicated practitioner - and their game in the opening is especially entertaining. As White, he often played these nondescript d4 openings in the style of Zukertort (most frequently at the London 1887 tournament, see here), but I've decided to show the one time he played the Steinitz Gambit for hopefully obvious reasons.
Opening (after New York): The New York tournament came around and suddenly Burn switched to being a strictly Modern player, essaying proper Ruy Lopez games with White and switching to e5 as Black. I'm not immediately sure what brought on this change, though it's not like it's a bad one - no player really suffers by switching to the Spanish, especially not a student of Steinitz. It's still a bit of a strange phenomenon, and one that perhaps deserves further investigation.
Middlegame: In their sketch of him, Leopold Hoffer's The Chess-Monthly wrote that Burn "seldom combines unless forced to do so," which is mostly correct. I was tempted to be petty and fill this section with counterexamples (and I'll doubtlessly have reason to share those games later), but that wouldn't be particularly honest. Burn's style was very mature, and he won many games against weaker opponents by batting away whatever mediocre plan they concocted, after which their position deteriorated so quickly that he would either win material or get a crushing attack without the need to sacrifice. Even against stronger players, Burn was very good at waiting patiently, looking for any weakness his opponent created and pressuring it relentlessly.
It's very worth focusing on that "unless forced" bit, however. Hoffer also notes in the sketch how much lower Burn's draw rate is than some of his Modern peers, and I believe the reason why is that he was arguably the best defender in the world (maybe Louis Paulsen could rival him, but perhaps not in the 80s). Not only was he a terrific defender, he was arguably one of the world's strongest odds players - simaginfan has written about a handful of examples here. So what really set Burn apart from his peers was an incredible eye for tactics; he could withstand almost any attack, sacrificing along the way if he needed to, and often his opponents would stumble into the final mistake. The Blackburne game above is a great example, and the Gunsberg game below (covered twice in the London 1887 chapters but worth showing again) is yet another.
Endgame: It feels incredibly strange to say, but having gone through his games, I don't think Burn was a particularly exceptional endgame player - perhaps weaker than Riemann. Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but I almost feel like Burn treated the endgame as a reward for playing a good middlegame. He never seemed to chop wood until he had already acquired some tangible advantage (for example, he won many pawn-up endgames in Amsterdam, see here). This, I think, goes back to his real talent as a tactical wizard; in an era where most masters treated the endgame as a more mundane phase bereft of any dynamic potential, Burn needed as many pieces on the board as was feasible to get his opponent to trip up. The closest thing to a true endgame grind I could find was this game against Judd, but it's a nightmare to go over so I'm not sure it's worth it.
Conclusion
Depending on the matchup, I might take a moment to more explicitly list the players' accolades, but I don't think that's necessary here; Riemann competed in three major tournaments, Burn was the subject of three Winner's POV chapters (and hence won three major(ish) tournaments).
Hopefully the above games help shape your opinions of these two players, because now it's your turn. Vote for who you think the better player was in this decade. The winner moves on, the loser gets a blog post written about them. That means you, my lovely readers, get to choose the subject of my next blog. Thanks for reading, and happy voting.
