There are two great opening innovation stories that both come from 1918. One is the introduction of the Budapest Gambit — a group of minor Hungarian masters passing on the secrets of the Budapest at a tournament in Berlin, which led to the a...
Again, it’s hard to believe that this tournament really took place. It was held in September-October of 1918 with Berlin facing food shortages and the Armistice a month away. Schlechter would die of some combination of starvation or pneumoni...
Another somewhat ghoulish event from wartime Berlin. The tournament was one of several Bernhard Kagan-organized events. If the Lasker-Tarrasch match of 1916 had the aim of supporting a war charity, these 1918 events had the more limited and crucia...
As hard as it is to imagine a Lasker-Tarrasch match in 1916, it’s more difficult still to envision Rubinstein-Schlechter in Berlin in 1918. Schlechter would die of malnourishment in December and there’s something very ghostly about pla...
It’s a bit hard to believe that this match was played - both that anybody thought of organizing a chess match in Berlin in 1916 and also that Lasker and Tarrasch managed to put aside their differences to play a promotional match. Tarrasch's ...
In a last gasp of pre-war Utopianism - also, essentially, his dying wish - the chess Maecenas Isaac Rice sent out invitations to all the leading European masters to attend his planned tournament in New York in 1916. Needless to say, most of the in...
Another tournament with Capablanca at his height. The organizing committee invited a string of European masters, most of whom, unsurprisingly, did not respond, although somehow both Janowski and Borislav Kostic shipped across the Atlantic to be th...
In 1915 there was of course no chess in Europe and all competitive activity was limited to America. New York City held a tournament featuring the hemisphere’s strongest players, including Capablanca and Marshall. It was essentially the same ...
The “unfinished tournament” has become a part of chess lore. The tournament was the biannual German chess congress, which, befitting the pre-war spirit of international cooperation, was really just a very strong masters’ tourna...
Capablanca started the finals of the 1914 At Petersburg tournament with a commanding 1.5 point lead. He had put on a master class in the preliminaries. His biographer Miquel Sanchez wrote, "It is difficult to find a collection of games of such ser...
This probably is the greatest single tournament ever held. It’s really amazing how often it comes up - in virtually all of the classical intro to chess books I've read; and then in places as far-flung as Twin Peaks’s second season, whe...
An attractive match between two fighting players. Spielmann and Teichmann were of roughly equal strength and a similar temperament. Spielmann was a more one-sided player - a confirmed Neo-Romantic - but both he and Teichmann were distinguished by ...
The first meeting of Alekhine and Capablanca - and à humiliation for Alekhine. Having secured a sinecure-for-life from the Cuban government, Capablanca was dispatched to St Petersburg and played, essentially, a high-level 'simultaneous matc...
It’s a surprise to me, playing over games from this period, to realize how much Capablanca and Alekhine developed in tandem. Both had their first successes in 1909. Both emerged as international stars in 1911. But Capablanca arrived in inter...
In 1913, Capablanca, with his new post in the Cuban Foreign Office, was dispatched to Europe as an emissary-at-large. His titular post was as consul in St Petersburg, but, really, his task was to be a professional chess player, playing as widely a...
The travels of Oldrich Duras in 1913 precipitated a pair of quadrangular tournaments - one in St. Petersburg in April and another to accompany Duras’ visit to New York in September. Both tournaments had little at stake except to take advanta...
In 1913, for the first time, it becomes possible to talk about a Capablanca-Alekhine rivalry. By a scheduling quirk, the major Central European tournaments were held in 1912 leaving 1913 a barren chess year. The action shifted east and west - to a...
The second of a two-part series - a joint venture by the Manhattan and Havana Chess Clubs that served as an unofficial Pan-American championship. Capablanca won New York, winning his first ten straight games, and, after a loss to Jaffe, just holdi...
When Capablanca comes to mind, you tend to think either of the boy prodigy or of the international playboy, set for life and unassailably world champion. It’s easy to forget the somewhat itinerant New York stage - matriculating at Columbia, ...
Marshall and Janowski played five matches (!) against each other, for a total of 80 games, more encounters than any other pair of players until Botvinnik-Smyslov. This was match four, sponsored by Nardus, Janowski’s indefatigable patron, and...
The last stop on Rubinstein’s European tour of 1912 - and his fourth straight tournament victory. There’s a pleasing west-east flow to the tournaments: he started the year in San Sebastián in Spain at what would now be called a ...
The third leg in Rubinstein’s victory tour of 1912 - and the only one of his four tournament victories (a long-standing record) in which he shared first place, tying with Duras. There is something fitting about the result. They came up toget...
In 1909, Alexander Alekhine, at age 16, won the amateur chess championship of Russia, securing for himself the title of master. In 1910 he finished a very respectable shared seventh at Hamburg, alongside Tarrasch. In 1911 he finished shared ...
What are the best single-year performances in chess history? Just to throw out some possibilities: Paul Morphy (1858), Jose Capablanca (1922), Alexander Alekhine (1931), Mikhail Tal (1959), Bobby Fischer (1971), Anatoly Karpov (1977), Garry Kasp...
The premier tournament of its time. San Sebastián 1911 introduced Capablanca to the international chess scene. The tournament’s second incarnation didn’t have quite the same drama - Capablanca was unavailable to play - but it wa...
