A Century of Chess: Berlin 1920
Another of the high-class post-war tournaments, the first held in defeated Germany (organized by the indefatigable Bernhard Kagan who somehow kept world-level chess going during the war years). The tournament was almost exactly evenly split between hypermodernists and players of the old school, with the hypermodenists having one of their most dramatic successes. The quicksilver Gyula Breyer had the greatest sporting result of his career, winning the tournament by a full point. His games are a pleasure to play through, full of his trademark exchange sacrifice and virtually all of the elements of dynamic chess as Mihai Suba and John Watson would outline it nearly a century later.
Breyer was one of the most creative players to have ever pushed wood — the consensus in the early part of his career was that his creativity sometimes got the better of his competitive drive; and Berlin was a significant step indicating that he could play his whimsical chess and still get world-class results — and his death the next year, at age 28, remains one of chess' greatest-ever tragedies.
The tournament was the true arrival of Savielly Tartakower, who had been a creditable international master since 1907 but had been marked by a certain lack of ambition, always placing somewhere towards the middle of the crosstable. The war seems to have given an impetus to Tartakower, and, starting with his shared strong place finish at Berlin, he secured his place as one of the handful of top players in the world.
Bogoljubow continued his annus mirabilis, finishing shared second (the same year he also won a small tournament at Berlin, defeated Nimzowitsch in a match, took third at Gothenburg, and very nearly stole a match from Rubinstein), while Réti rounded out the hypermodernists' sweep by taking fourth place.
From a sporting point of view, it may have been the high-water mark of hypermodernism, with the great classicists Maróczy and Tarrasch falling to the middle of the crossable. Breyer, clearly very excited, called it "the final triumph of the modern school."
His notes, by the way, are a pleasure to read — like a Surrealist manifesto or something — full of claims that, for instance, after 1.d4 Nf6! black has "already equalized." Meanwhile, the dueling notes on the Breyer-Tarrasch game read like the Gossage-Vardebedian Papers, with both sides having, essentially, no shared agreement on the game that they had just played.
In 1937, Chess Review would claim — completely unscientifically — that Berlin 1920 "featured a higher percentage of good games than any tournament ever played."
Sources: The main source on the tournament is JImmy Adams' Gyula Breyer: The Chess Revolutionary. Savielly Tartakower discusses several games in The Hypermodern Game of Chess. Simaginfan has a post on the tournament here.
