A Century of Chess: Breslau 1912
The third leg in Rubinstein’s victory tour of 1912 - and the only one of his four tournament victories (a long-standing record) in which he shared first place, tying with Duras. There is something fitting about the result. They came up together, as part of what simaginfan calls the ‘Barmen generation’ - in their first international tournament, they shared first place in the Barmen ‘C’ section of 1905. At that time Duras seemed more clearly the coming talent. Over the next half-decade, though, Rubinstein proved himself a world championship candidate, while Duras, although a great master, wasn’t quite of the same class. At the German Congress of Breslau, Duras reasserted himself as Rubinstein’s equal, defeating him in their individual game and taking shared first with a frenetic finish - his last truly outstanding result before his abrupt retirement.
They were an interesting pair, the worldly, effervescent Duras, and the single-minded Rubinstein. As the Wiener Schachzeitung remarked, “Duras is gifted with a nerve-stretching fantasy compared to which the style of Rubinstein seems like the worldly wise style of the old Goethe. Goethe and Grabbe transferred to chess!”
The tournament was a horse-race between Rubinstein, Duras, Tarrasch, and Teichmann, with Marshall and Schlechter also in the running. I admit - as I discussed in my previous post - to finding Rubinstein’s play a bit monotonous. Whenever possible, he pulls the chute on the middlegame and exchanges to an equal ending where he’s able to outplay anyone. When he’s attacked, he defends nimbly and with absolute tactical economy exchanges down to the ending. In this tournament, the intimidation factor worked in his favor, and a few of his opponents played so poorly that it was impossible for him to pass up winning attacks.
He led most of the way, although was obviously tired from his busy year (Lasker, following Rubinstein's play through his column in Pester Lloyd, thought he was due to collapse), and going into the last round shared first with Tarrasch, with Teichmann and Duras a half-point behind. Teichmann, paired with Rubinstein, played furiously for the win but was lucky to draw. Duras, who won five of his last six, defeated Amos Burn in Burn’s last-ever tournament game to catch Rubinstein. Tarrasch, meanwhile, lost to the outsider Carls - ironically, given Tarrasch’s inveterate opposition to hypermodernism, he lost haplessly to an ultra-modern English Opening setup - and dropped to shared fourth.
There was an idea, by the way, that this tournament, actually, marked the start of Rubinstein's decline - that, after this, he would be a top player but not quite the same indomitable force. As Lasker observed, the tough campaign of 1912 clearly tired him out, and Paul Leonhardt in an article argued that the chess world had learned to play Rubinstein. "The particular weakness of Rubinstein is no longer a secret," he wrote. "After Spielmann [at Bad Pistyan] had demonstrated the ease with which Rubinstein could be upset by luring him onto unsafe ground and pestering him with attacks, newcomers such as Barasz and Lowcki resorted in the Breslau tournament to the same tactics."
As for the rest of the cross-table, Teichmann, who really was at his competitive peak around this time, took third place with clean classical play - and was particularly effective against the 'innovators.'
Schlechter had reverted to his pre-1900 reputation as the ‘drawing master’: he went through his second tournament in a row without a loss, amassing 24 draws out of 34 games. Jacques Mieses came out of retirement and returned immediately to his swashbuckling form.
Gyula Breyer, who had also had a good tournament at Bad Pistyan, established himself as an internationally-creditable master with an impressive eighth place finish - the exchange sacrifice in his game against Treybal seems about a half-century ahead of its time.
The Hungarian player Zsigmond Barasz put in the best result of his career.
There was only one new German player in the German Congress (out of four Germans total) - that was the Bremen master Carls, who had a couple of spoiler wins in this tournament but otherwise had a somewhat undistinguished career. Lasker, in his write-up on the tournament, was particularly struck by the absence of young German talent - in general, there seemed to be little new blood entering the ranks of master chess at this time.
More than any of the results, this tournament is remembered for a single move: 23…Qg3!!, which prompted immediate resignation in the game Levitsky-Marshall and may be the single most famous chess move ever played. The story is that the spectators were so moved that they showered the board with golden pieces. That’s one of these stories that I kind of assumed was completely apocryphal, but, actually, it seems to be more or less true.
The Russian spectators at the tournament, particularly the magnate Saburov and Alexander Alekhine (who was returning to Russia from Stockholm), had a significant bet going on behalf of their countryman, the talented, enigmatic Urals player Stefan Levitsky. The majority of the game wasn’t particularly interesting. Marshall won a piece and Levitsky was playing for tricks when Marshall produced the crashing shot 23….Qg3.
Marshall, in his memoir, wrote “I have often been asked whether this really happened. The answer is - yes, that is what happened, literally!” The tone makes you think that Marshall is being tongue-in-cheek and trying to not spoil a good story. In his journal at the time, he wrote demurely, “A purse was presented to me after the game.” The Czech player Walter Korn, though, heard from both Duras and Treybal - who were both present at the tournament - that the ‘showering’ had really happened. When 23….Qg3 appeared, the bettors tossed over their losses - rubles, marks, thalers, Austrian crowns, some of them in gold, were thrown directly onto the board.
Sources: chessgames.com is completely essential to putting all of these together. Other than that, I didn't come across that many insightful sources on Breslau 1912. Donaldson and Minev's The Life and Games of Akiva Rubinstein is, as usual, the best of many sources on Rubinstein's career. Jimmy Adams' Gyula Breyer: The Chess Revolutionary has annotations of most of Breyer's games from the event. The Levitsky-Marshall game is discussed extensively around the web. Edward Winter, not surprisingly, has what seems to be a definitive account. Andy Soltis has access to Marshall's private papers. And Marshall's published account is in his Marshall's Games of Chess.
