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 ...
I've been spending far longer than I meant to on the Alekhine-Bogoljubow match because ... it was a really good match! It was certainly the fighting-ist championship match since Lasker-Steinitz 1894 and may well have been the fighting-ist match of...
The match quieted down a little after the torrid pace of the first eight games — but only by a little. Now it was five decisive results in eight games, as opposed to six. And, after the wild start, the dynamic for the rest of the match was s...
These Alekhine-Bogoljubow matches have a bad reputation — which is undeserved, at least in the case of the first match. The chess world liked the idea of having Capablanca as the world champion and got obsessed with the prospect of a rematch...
Starting around 1929, Capablanca’s life starts to assume the aspect of a tragedy. More than for just about anybody else, there’s a sense with Capablanca of being born with a very particular fate — to be the world champion —...
Dear Friends, I have a post up on the chess.com home page about the book of A Century of Chess (Volume 1). - Sam Aron Nimzowitsch made his début at Barmen 1905 as a gifted 19-year-old — and finished in third-to-last-...
One of the quirks of learning chess history is that it makes you pull out the atlas and learn these really obscure US towns. Cambridge Springs is a railroad town in western Pennsylvania that for a short time boasted a world-class hotel. Lake ...
Dear all, Please do consider purchasing the first volume of the Century of Chess series from Amazon. Your purchase helps to keep the series going! - Sam The Capablanca tournaments at the end of the 1920s have exactly the asp...
As a reminder, the book of this series, A Century of Chess: Book One: 1900-1909 is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback. I'm picking up the series in 1928. Bad Kissingen was meant to be the start of Capablanca’s rehabilit...
Dear Chess Blogging Community, I am thrilled to share that A Century of Chess: Book One: 1900-1909 is published and available for purchase on Amazon in both paperback and kindle. This really has been a labor of love and has be...
FIDE — the Féderation Internationale des Échecs — has had a deeply vexed career and, fittingly, the organization got off to a rocky start. Founded in 1924 as an outgrowth of the Paris Olympic Games, the organization strug...
