A Century of Chess: Carlos Torre (1920-29)
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 noticed within the chess scene. "Carlos electrified the crowd," the New Orleans player E.Z. Adams wrote of Torre's first appearance at a New Orleans chess club. Adams would go on to be a mentor and advocate of Torre, writing modestly, "My chess career consists principally of my interest in Carlos." It's somehow appropriate that the game for which Torre is still best known is a almost certainly a composition that he and Adams cooked up together with the win — as was characteristic of Torre — attributed to Adams.
Adams was responsible for Torre's introduction to the wider American chess scene. In 1920, he wrote to the influential Hermann Helms, "The little fellow is very modest and unassuming and his success in chess has not given him the swell head," and, in 1924, Torre played in a series of small tournaments in New York where he proved himself the equal of Marshall and defeated everyone else with ease. He was New York's representative at the 1924 Western Championship, which was effectively a U.S. Championship, and won convincingly, ahead of, among others, the 12-year-old Reshevsky. Everyone, inevitably, was reminded of the appearance of Capablanca, although Torre played in a fresher, more attacking style (in a late-life interview he attributed that, to some extent, to his boyhood reading of James Mason’s books). The other aspect of the Torre legend that emerged around this time was his great courtliness — his tendency to offer draws even from clearly-winning positions, which demonstrated his dislike of the competitive aspects of his chess and his preference for treating the game as pure art.
Torre received an invitation to the Baden-Baden 1925 tournament and embarked together with Marshall. En route, the two of them inevitably played some enormous number of games, including this miniature with Torre showing the power of his invention, the Two Knights Tango (or Mexican Defense).
At Baden-Baden his courtliness came to the fore. He played carefully, with most newspapers concluding that he was shy in the presence of so many famous grandmasters. But Torre had a creditable showing, finishing with a positive score in his début. Emanuel Lasker, who helped to secure Torre's invitation to the event, would remark, "Torre's games are interesting, his style is promising, his combinations are classy."
Marienbad was something like the palate cleanser after Baden-Baden but still a very strong tournament and the acme of Torre’s career. Here, he finished shared third in an elite field and earned international acclaim from the chess cognoscenti as a potential world championship challenger. After his victory over Yates (below), Nimzowitsch, who was watching the game avidly, declared loud enough for the entire playing hall to hear, “A new genius has arisen in the world of chess."
After his success at Marienbad there was immense interest in Torre during the Moscow 1925 tournament. As his biographer Gabriel Velasco writes, “At 19, he had reached an extraordinary level of ability and maturity.”
And Torre mostly delivered on that. He was with the leaders for much of the tournament, won his individual game against Emanuel Lasker, and led the tournament for one glorious day, but his aversion to competitiveness seemed to catch up with him and he faded down the stretch.
This was — sad as it is to relate — Torre’s last international tournament. He played in the strong Chicago Masters in 1926 and shortly afterwards had a nervous breakdown and returned to Mexico. This has always been one of the more enigmatic episodes in chess history, and there are two main versions of the story, both equally lurid. In one, Torre suddenly had a breakdown, began taking his clothes off on a New York City bus and had to be hospitalized. In the other, he received a letter from his fiancée announcing that she was marrying another man, and the devastation prompted Torre to give up chess. It’s somewhat unfortunate that Velasco, in his interview with Torre in 1977, didn’t really press Torre on what had happened. But this is what Torre did say:
"After the tournament in Chicago, in 1926, my health was shattered due to dietary difficulties. In fact I suffered a nervous breakdown. A young, single man with scant and unstable financial resources, far from his family and in fragile health, is always prone to nervous depressions. The travel and lifestyle involved in high-level tournaments is intense and maddening. I preferred to return to my country to work with my brother at something more stable."
The dietary difficulties seem to be that he wasn’t eating properly and was binging on sweets. The sense is that — his poise notwithstanding — Torre actually was very high-strung and eccentric. Velasco actually does seem to believe the ‘clothes taken off on the bus’ story — at least he states it as a fact — and it seems possible that that’s how the nervous breakdown manifested itself. (The origin of the story is Reuben Fine, who had a propensity to just make things up, but also visited Torre in Mexico in the ‘30s.) Velasco pretty firmly discredits the ‘Dear John’ letter story, which seems to have drifted over from a novel written around the same time.
What is completely clear is that, after the nervous breakdown, Torre rejoined his family in Mexico, eventually took a low-paying job in a drugstore in Monterey (his brother was a doctor), and never played high-level chess again. In 1934, Fine found that his playing quality was much diminished. Velasco, who met him in the ‘70s, writes, "He took the occasional odd job but lived mostly in poverty. He had little or no concern for money, women, or mundane pleasures, and developed an interest in Buddhism."
Torre’s Style:
1.Dynamic imbalances. It’s slightly difficult, playing a game like the Yates game, to understand why other chess players were quite so rapturous about it, but grandmasters usually should be taken seriously when they talk like this, and the point seems to be that Torre figured out a slightly different relation between the pieces. This seems to be related to the way that Kasparov would play much later, that material imbalances could produce pockets of dynamic initiative in different segments of the board. So the exchange of bishop for knight in the Yates game gave Torre attacking possibilities on the kingside.
2.Attacking from solid positions. The other — maybe more obvious point about Torre — is his ability to generate really stunning attacks from apparently quiet, tame positions, above all in the Queen’s Pawn Opening. All club players have at some point had to deal with the terrors of the Torre Attack (which Torre introduced at Moscow 1925) where white very unfairly seems to get a dangerous kingside initiative without having taken any real risks in the center. The way to understand what’s going on may be a more dramatic differentiation of the board into different quadrants, with Torre radiating energy in one direction or another. It’s noteworthy, in the Velasco interview, that Torre cites the influence of Elfin Bogoljubow, who, he claims (I don’t know if this is really true or not), was the first to divide the board into the 'kingside, queenside, and center.'
3.Pure piece play. Torre’s other great opening contribution, apart from the Torre Attack, was the Mexican Attack or Two Knights Tango, which produces a kind of dizzying aesthetic effect, as in the below game against Samisch, which must be one of the greatest chess games ever played (nowtihstanding the fact that it’s a 21-move draw). The idea here — which made a dramatic impression in the 1920s — is that it’s possible to play almost without pawns at all, with pieces developing around the pawn structure.
Sources: Gabriel Velasco's The Life and Games of Carlos Torre is the main source on him. Edward Winter has two well-researched articles on Torre.
