A new star shows up in our history with Mikhail Botvinnik’s victory at the 1931 USSR Championship. Botvinnik established himself as a teenager as a strong, talented player, but he didn’t have the kind of meteoric ascent that other worl...
What are the most dominating performances in chess history? Bobby Fischer in the 1970-72 Candidates cycle. Caruana at Sinquefield 2014. Some of Kasparov's tournaments towards his 1990s peak and some of Carlsen's towards his in the 2010s. But Alekh...
Max Euwe continued his social promotion-y path to the world championship by being paired in a match with Capablanca. Euwe had never won a major international tournament and probably wasn’t in the top five in the world, but he just finished a...
There's a special corner in chess heaven that looks exactly like this — Capablanca just cruising through a field with elegant play and in a class all by himself. It's been a little while since we've had a scene like this, and it's nice to go...
Come to think of it, Savielly Tartakower and Sultan Khan were somewhat similar players — both wildly creative and with a gift for playing all across the board. They ended up paired together at Liège 1930, with Khan leading most of the...
There may well be no more interesting player in chess history than Sultan Khan. Everybody else I’ve covered in this series comes from the same chess tradition — even the players from furthest afield, like Capablanca, Torre, or Levitsky...
What are the greatest periods of dominance in chess history? Morphy's 1858 European tour; Lasker from 1907-1909; Capablanca in his six-year stretch without a loss; Tal's run to the world championship; Fischer from 1970-1972; Kasparov in the late '...
In a sense the high-water mark of Nimzowitsch’s career. Nimzowitsch had an astonishing success at Karlsbad 1929, scoring +9, and to outright win two consecutive international tournaments, even if the quality of the opposition was somewhat lo...
As far as the European chess scene was concerned, Alexander Alekhine had died somewhere in the tumult surrounding the Russian Revolution and Civil War — a rumor that would at some point get folded into the story (which may actually have happ...
If there is a chess heaven, it may well look like chess in the early 1920s. The players will wear tuxedos. The photos will all be in black-and-white. Opening innovations will be discovered while on ocean liners. And what is not at all in dispute i...
I think of Lasker's career in a few distinct stages. Before 1894, he's the upstart, a young coffee klatsch Berliner playing a kind of un-genteel but unstoppable chess. From 1894 to 1900, he's the usurper, the legitimate world c...
Efim Bogoljubow was born in 1889 in what is now western Ukraine. Very few top players have had such an inconspicuous rise to stardom as he did. He was strong enough to secure an invitation to Mannheim in 1914 but was largely an unknown quantity. I...
Nimzowitsch entered the 1920s as one of the strongest players in the world, known for his eccentric style — and then disappeared for several years. The chaos of the war years affected him deeply. He left Riga during the Civil War, lived in G...
The chess world had largely moved on from Rubinstein by the 1920s. He was poor, he was strange, he was slowly going crazy, and he was not at all a participant in the flashy theoretical discussions underway. As Tartakower wrote, "His tragedy consis...
In my piece on Vidmar for “Chess in the 1910s,” I argued that Vidmar may well be the most underestimated player in chess history. He confirms that somewhat whimsical status with his performance in the 1920s — by my metric (head-t...
Carlos Torre was born in 1904 in Mérida, Mexico. When he was six he pulled the Capablanca trick of learning the rules of chess from watching his brothers play. At 11, the family moved to New Orleans and Torre’s talents were quickly no...
Gennady Sosonko has — as one would expect from him — a beautiful chapter on Grigory Levenfish in his Russian Silhouettes. Levenfish was the product of the first great wave of Russian chess — a wave that smashed against World War ...
Probably my favorite player. Tartakower was born in 1887 in Rostov, then part of the Russian Empire. His father owned a textile factory and Tartakower remembered his childhood as one long holiday — the family vacationing all across Russia....
Marshall was very much yesterday’s man by the 1920s, but was still a world class player, something like the permanent US champion, and placed surprisingly highly in international events — above all, coming close to the winner’s c...
Richard Réti was born in 1889 to a Jewish Austro-Hungarian family in what's now Slovakia and was raised mostly in Vienna. As a six-year-old, he pulled the Capablanca/Smyslov trick of watching his older family members play a chess game and t...
Spielmann, I have said, was maybe the most amusing chess player of his era. He seems to have been a very simple person who liked his beer and his creature comforts and for some reason played a wild, adventuring chess. "Spielmann plays always like ...
There is a case to be made that Pyotr Romanovsky was actually the most significant chess player of the 20th century. The argument would run that, clearly, the most important development in top-flight chess was the creation of the Soviet chess mach...
There probably has never been a chess player who so consistently had the wind at his back as Max Euwe. He was born in the right place at the right time — in the Netherlands, a small, prosperous country with good organization and interest in ...
I had fully expected to finish up with Tarrasch last decade — and had said really everything I had to say about him — and so it was a slightly unpleasant discovery to realize that, according to my qualification system, he was also one ...
Let’s face it. This decade is a bit of a slog. The war choked off young talent, with the exception of Euwe and (briefly Torre), and the decade was spent with the same ten or twelve players, all of whom had emerged on the international scene ...
