The backbone of classical chess. Marco was born in Bukovina - at the outer extremity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a young man, he came to Vienna to study medicine and then was badly bitten by the chess bug - in a reminiscence of his ...
A quirk of chess history is the recurring figure of the lone American genius who travels to Europe and takes the continent by storm. This has happened more times, and had a more profound impact on chess, than one might expect. There's Morphy in 18...
"Of all the chess masters I ever met Rudolf Swiderski was the most weird," wrote Frank Marshall. Which - just think of all the chess masters you know - is probably really saying something. "He made very few friends, had a gentle but mela...
Dawid Janowski occupies something of a dubious position in chess history - he's the poor sport with the gambling problem who hated endgames, fixated on the two bishops, and somehow convinced his art swindler friend to stake him not once but twice ...
As Mozart is to Salieri and Shakespeare is to Jonson, so Rubinstein is to Georg Salwe. It's hard to think of another player who, without ever having been a trainer or second, is encompassed so completely in somebody else's shadow. I'll save the ...
After Chigorin and before Spielmann there was Mieses - keeper of the flame of the Romantic School. Mieses was born in Leipzig in 1865. According to Gabriel Velasco, he switched his name in his mid-20s from Jakob to his middle name Jacques ...
“The style of the period showed little initiative, the idea being merely to wait for an opponent to blunder into an incorrect position because of his ignorance of the Steinitz theories,” wrote Richard Réti of the chess era aroun...
By late 1909, Rubinstein seemed invincible. He had won at Ostend-B and then at Carlsbad 1907, the first major international tournament he played in. He won a match and a match-tournament over the great Frank Marshall and a short match against Rich...
There’s an odd background to this match. Marshall was clearly the strongest U.S. player after the death of Harry Pillsbury, but there had never been an opportunity to reify his status as U.S. champion. In early 1909, the New York State Chess...
By 1909, it was apparent that Janowski had lost a step. He had finished far from the leaders both at Carlsbad and at Prague. He was losing his sense of proportion in positions and taking increasingly unwarranted risks. But, as he had been for over...
What is the greatest début in chess history? Easy. Capablanca’s thrashing of Frank Marshall in their 1909 match (+8-1=14). The others that come to mind are Morphy in 1857, Spassky in 1955, Fischer in 1958, but they had all had some se...
The last tournament of the decade and the most famous. The vast majority of international tournaments of the era were in the German-speaking world and had a distinctly bourgeois flavor. Tournaments in Russia were rare and a treat – they were...
As if the eight games they played against each other in the Lodz match-tournament weren’t enough, Rubinstein and Marshall next met for a match in Warsaw in October. The two players would seem to have little to do with each other – they...
Marshall, in his European wanderings, ventured as far east as Lodz for a peculiar triangular match-tournament with Rubinstein and Salwe. (It was meant to be a five-player tournament, but both Schlechter and Marco declined their invitations.) Rubin...
The long-overdue match between Lasker and Tarrasch finally took place in 1908. They had been the two best players in the world since the early 1890s (with a brief interruption by Pillsbury). Tarrasch had been proposed for a world championship with...
By 1908, Frank Marshall’s limitations as a chess player were obvious. He couldn’t compete at the very highest level – as had been demonstrated in his match losses to Tarrasch and Lasker – and there was a certain lack of gro...
The second major tournament of the Austro-Hungarian jubilee – a celebration of the 60th anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph’s accession to the throne. Duras was the hometown boy and he delivered, tying with Schlechter for first place. ...
1908 was a jubilee year in the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the 60th anniversary of Franz Joseph’s accession to the throne – and the Empire celebrated, naturally enough, with a series of high-profile chess tournaments. The Vienna to...
Among players of the classical era, it’s somehow easy to underrate Janowski. There was the difficult personality, the really execrable match score against Lasker, an unfortunate tapering off of playing form in the era after World War I...
Really a three-player tournament between Schlechter, Maróczy, and Leonhardt, with the local Danish players providing a useful tune-up between rounds. Leonhardt was a regular participant in the major international tournaments of the classica...
If any ascent in chess history is comparable to Bobby Fischer’s, it’s that of Akiba Rubinstein in the period 1906-1909. What’s important to understand is that chess in the classical period was dominated by the German cultural emp...
In 1907, the Ostend tournament was split into two - a patrician championship section that doubled as a sort of Candidates Tournament and a more democratic Masters section, featuring a 31 player all-play-all, the largest round-robin ever conducted....
After the abstruse and unpopular organizing system at Ostend 1906, the organizers reverted to a more traditional format: a cozy championship section, featuring six players in a round-robin, and a boisterous masters’ section of thirty players...
While playing through the games of the classical period it came as something of a shock to me to realize to what extent Lasker was absent from chess for so much of his championship reign. With the sole exception of Bobby Fischer, no other world ch...
One of the great unvarying constants of the classical era was the performance of Jacques Mieses. Mieses established himself as a world-class player in 1889. From then until roughly 1910 he was always in the top fifteen or twenty in the world but n...
