A Century of Chess: Aron Nimzowitsch (1920-29)

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 Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, which became his permanent abode. For several years he was, clearly, penniless — making his living from lessons, articles, simultaneous displays. He participated in only one international tournament at this time, finishing third from bottom at Gothenburg 1920, the tournament that did so much to establish the international pecking order of the 1920s.

But during this time Nimzowitsch also worked at chess — and how he worked. I imagine this as Nimzowitsch pouring the midnight oil, venturing very very deep into the heart of the game, when by all rights he should have been thinking about how to feed himself and move out of the one-room apartment where he lived the rest of his life.

The results began to emerge in 1923 when Nimzowitsch played in a small tournament in Copenhagen and finished two points ahead of the rest of the field. As Edward Winter writes, "It is tempting to imagine the game[s] being instantly flashed around the planet as a unique specimen of hypermodern technique....in truth, the score[s] [are] absent from almost all the major chess magazines of 1923," but in time the games would have an enormous impact and seemed to introduce a completely new kind of chess. The victory over Sämisch in particular remains the enduring model of constriction — Nimzowitsch sacrificing a full piece for nothing but positional compensation and using that to put his opponent in zugzwang. 

From the Copenhagen games it’s possible to see what Nimzowitsch was up to. He opens the game by moving backwards, shuffling his pieces within the first three ranks in order to create both a super-solid, unassailable position and then to develop his pieces to squares where they have latent potential energy. Usually his opponents have had aggressive thoughts, and Nimzowitsch’s main task is to focus on defense, to intercept his opponent’s plans just before they reach the top of the hill and start rolling down again. This phase of the game, which Nimzowitsch would immortalize as The Blockade, has a very judo-esque quality to it, turning an opponent’s strengths into weaknesses. Of particular importance is the square in front of an advanced pawn which becomes the linchpin for radiating energy out and organizing the counterattack. Once the enemy’s advance is slowed, Nimzowitsch’s position turns into a moving forest, slowly and harmoniously moving its way up the board. The real goal — as in the game with Sämisch — isn’t so much the attack but to put the opponent in zugzwang. And everything in Nimzowitsch seems based on the arts of constriction. In the early part of the game, he always puts himself on the brink of paralysis, like a homeowner who has had a maniac break in and immediately heads for the cellar as opposed to fighting it out. The smallest mistake here is usually fatal, but Nimzowitsch puts great care into battening down all the hatches and making his position impenetrable. And then when the reverse takes place and the opponent’s attractive position is revealed as overextended, Nimzowitsch begins forcing him back, and this time, as his opponent retreats in disorganization, his constriction proves fatal. 

Nimzowitsch shared his ideas with the world in a series of texts — Die Blockade (1925), My System (1925-7) and Chess Praxis (1929) that remain the cornerstone of Ph.D-level chess education. Nimzowitsch was always at least half-insane and his writing is ever ripe for parody. Hans Kmoch produced a brilliant parody in 1928. Yasser Seirawan throughly trashes Nimzowitsch here. But the books do for the art of defense what Morphy’s games did for attack, introducing a whole new higher dimension into chess. The really critical ideas are the blockade and prophylaxis — the idea that it really is possible to play productively entirely by employing defensive means, anticipating all of an opponent’s attacks, and then putting all of one’s energy into blunting those until the opponent really does run out of ideas. It’s an extremely energy-intensive and thankless way of playing a game of chess — moving backwards at full speed, with a clinical paranoiac’s attention to potential attacking ideas, with very little margin for error, with a win maybe 80 moves off and dependent on exact technique — but it may be close to the higher truth of the game. Tigran Petrosian rode Nimzowitsch’s techniques directly into the world championship. He describes growing up with Nimzowitsch's books tucked under his pillow at night. Ulf Andersson, Ray Keene, Bent Larsen and many other top grandmasters are all confirmed Nimzowitscheans. 

Within the Nimzowitschean scripture there is the peculiar exegesis around overprotection. This is a bit harder to understand and I’m really not sure I fully get it. The concept itself is easy enough, that the thing to do in the early phases of the game is to develop a strong point and then radiate all one’s energy towards it. Once the strong point opens up, then that energy will turn into kinetic energy that can now flow through the vacated square. What Nimzowitsch was thinking of above all — and dedicated tremendous theoretical attention to — was white’s e5 pawn in the French Advance Variation where black inevitably plays …f6 and then after exchanging white can ‘play through’ the e5 square. The obvious objection is what happens if the opponent just ‘island hops’ and plays around the strong point, and the tendency of chess players, I think, is to not take overprotection too literally. What it represents above all is a strategy for white (Nimzowitsch’s other ideas tend to be more helpful for black) that doesn’t require just blindly seizing space but rather securing strong points on the board and then using those in very measured way to be the base for further operations. 

Nimzowitsch made little of this in his theoretical writings, but one of the striking features of his play dating back to the 1900s was his willingness to play aggressively on the wings and to attack, when he deigned to attack, through a pincer maneuver. A memorable instance of this is his game against Vidmar where he seems to violate every beginner rule at once but gets his pieces flowing into the game from all sorts of unexpected directions. 

Nimzowitsch’s contributions to the opening are countless. He developed lines in the Sicilian, French, Philidor, English, and of course the Nimzo-Indian, as well as creating the Nimzowitsch Defense and Nimzo-Larsen. His game against Bogoljubow is a triumph of opening play, creating static weaknesses in Bogoljubow’s position, while he retains inexhaustible fluidity. 

It’s tempting to think of Nimzowitsch as primarily a theoretician, as Charley Lau is to hitting or Dave Van Ronk to folk music — but in the late 1920s he suddenly had a run of remarkable results. He was tied for first at Marienbad 1925, clear first at Dresden 1926 a point-and-a-half ahead of Alekhine, shared first at London 1927, third at New York 1927, first at Karlsbad 1929 ahead of Capablanca. Those results vaulted Nimzowitsch into the world championship conversation, which he participated in with characteristic immodesty and classlessness. According to one oft-reported story he printed visiting cards calling himself the "Crown Prince of the Chess World" — with the premise that a match was owed to him. This of course ignored the equally credible claims of Bogoljubow, Rubinstein, and Capablanca himself. But there always was a core of rationality within Nimzowitsch’s madness. At Karlsbad 1929 he showed that he really was walking a higher path of chess theory. Nimzowitsch claims that, with his usual manic lucidity, he sat down before every game saying to himself, "I believe in the validity of my chess ideas and I believe that I am capable of demonstrating their correctness" and showed that he was playing a chess that even the other leading hypermoderns didn’t understand. Bogoljubow, his main rival for the world championship, found himself completely outclassed in a Nimzo-Indian and lost like a child (in the game above). Capablanca, watching Tartakower struggle against Nimzowitsch, remarked, "One man knows what he is up to in playing that crazy sort of stuff, and the other man does not." Paired with his elevated theoretical understanding was a more pedestrian ability to simply play great tactical chess — as is illustrated for instance in these games against two of his leading rivals.

Unfortunately, Nimzowitsch never did get the world championship match against Alekhine — which would have been one of the great battles ever of attack against defense — but, as he may have always suspected, his greatest contributions would be in the realm of theory, creating a higher order of defensive chess that is still extraordinarily difficult to understand let alone emulate.

Sources: Nimzowitsch's three main books, Die Blockade, My System, and Chess Praxis are all-but-required reading for serious chessplayers. Skjoldager and Nielsen's biography can be read in part here. Edward Winter's primary page on him is here.