A Century of Chess: Chess in the 1910s

If there is a heaven for chess players, it may well look like the chess scene in the early part of the 1910s. This was the period of the “first hypermodern revolution,” of the iconic San Sebastián and St Petersburg tournaments, of a real efflorescence of talent and creative play, and of a more widespread acceptance of chess as an art and a professional pursuit.

Of course, the curtain came down dramatically on that golden age — literally, between the eleventh and twelfth rounds of the Mannheim 1914 tournament, with many of the tournament’s participants summarily arrested — and, from a chess perspective, the rest of the decade was lost to questions of what-might-have-been.

To be completely honest, the war affected the careers of leading chessplayers less than might have been expected. Cohn was killed on the Western Front in August, 1918. Schlechter died of some combination of pneumonia and malnutrition later that year. Tarrasch lost one of his sons to combat — while all three would die during the decade. Bernstein — in one of the most famous chess stories ever — was compelled to play a game for his life, facing a firing squad if he lost. The war displaced, among others, Nimzowitsch, Alekhine, Janowski, Kostić, Tartakower, Bogoljubow. However, there was also time to pass during the war. A nice collection of photos by introuble2 shows that chess was a leading pastime on the frontlines. A surprising number of high-level tournaments were held in Central Europe even after the economy had virtually collapsed and one would have expected the players to be preoccupied with survival. And the war seemed to provide enjoyable practice time for players like Bogoljubow, Flamberg, and Rabinovich, who were able to play eight tournaments while interned; and for Réti, who was assigned to clerical work and given encouragement, by lenient superior officers, to continue his chess studies. 

In terms of the evolution of chess thought, there were four distinct movements during this period.

The most important — and least discussed — was the advent of what Milan Vidmar called the “sturm und drang style.” This was discernible as early as 1905, in the play of Osip Bernstein and the “Barmen generation,” but really came of age with a group of talented masters who all seemed to reach maturity at the same time circa 1910. These players had imbibed the classical, Steinitzian approach but were not convinced that that meant that a proper chess game had to be conducted placidly or “scientifically.” They had a sort of seek-and-destroy attitude and were looking for engagement and complications at every possible turn. There are a large number of players who belong to this school — Spielmann, Alekhine, Vidmar, Forgacs, Tartakower, Nimzowitsch, Bernstein, Duras, Levenfish, Cohn, Rotlewi — and many of them would be leading lights in chess for decades to come. 

Hypermodern chess, the most highly-publicized development of this period, was in a sense really just an outgrowth of the sturm und drang style. The initial name for it — “Neo-Romanticism” — is something of a surprise given hypermodernism’s subsequent reputation for “anti-gravitational,” super-positional play. The first hypermodern revolution, like the second, was largely the work of Aron Nimzowitsch. In a series of vituperative newspaper articles starting in 1911, Nimzowitsch picked a fight with Siegbert Tarrasch - with Tarrasch more than willing to accept the challenge — and the two railed against each other over such life-and-death issues as the French Advance Variation, symmetrical openings, and the evaluation of cramped positions. Tarrasch, who was tailor-made for the part of reactionary foil against innovative progress, complained of hypermodern ideas as “the horror of all true friends of the noble game.” Nimzowitsch, meanwhile, responded that "ridicule can do much, embitter the lives of young talents for instance, but one thing it cannot do is to put a permanent halt to the breakthrough of new and powerful ideas." Since both Tarrasch and Nimzowitsch were prone to a touch of hysteria in their writing, it would have been possible to interpret these early spats as being driven above all by vanity, but, by 1913, Nimzowitsch had articulated the key idea, “that the center consists of the squares in the middle of the board, squares, not pawns,” which shaped the subsequent direction of hypermodern thought — that apparently cramped positions could be very powerful and that kinetic factors mattered more than was recognized in classical theory. 

From a competitive standpoint, the most dramatic development of the 1910s actually went in a completely different direction — towards a sort of heightened classicism. Akiba Rubinstein reached the peak of his career, winning four international tournaments in 1912, and doing so with a heavily “foreshortened” style, creating an architecturally-sound position and then simplifying at the earliest available opportunity to an endgame. Jose Raúl Capablanca, who burst onto the international scene with a dazzling win at San Sebastián 1911, brought a machine-like precision to classical chess, rarely attacking or even creating complications but demonstrating an uncanny ability to outplay anyone from “simple” positions. 

Meanwhile, Emanuel Lasker retained his world championship title while playing a peculiar chess that no one really understood or was able to emulate. Lasker’s style emphasized counterattacks, the art of defense, but above all keeping one’s head no matter how uncertain the position became. Throughout the decade, Lasker seemed to defy the odds — prevailing in a must-win game in the final of his 1910 world championship match against Schlechter and then scoring 7 out of 8 against the very best in the world to close out St Petersburg 1914. 

It’s my custom, with these write-ups, to create a “tournament” of the top players of the decade. What I do is identify the top 16 players and have a double round-robin tournament between them, logging their actual scores in games they played against each other during the period.
It’s appropriate that Lasker, Rubinstein, and Capablanca tie for first place (with Lasker winning on head-to-head tiebreaks). Capablanca was the wunderkind of the decade; Rubinstein the premier tournament player; and Lasker the great “big-game” player. As for the rest of the crosstable, the sensation is the performance of Milan Vidmar, who is one of the most underestimated players in chess history. Vidmar was unassuming and was never considered a world-title candidate, but he finished second at San Sebastián 1911 and at Mannheim 1914 and won a small tournament in Berlin in 1918. I’m not really surprised by any of the other results. Teichmann — another very underrated player — did a bit better than I would have expected and Alekhine and Marshall a bit worse.

Openings of the 1910s

1. The Queen’s Gambit Declined remained the dominant idea for the chess world. Duras introduced a key new idea, exchanging off black’s “bad” light-squared bishop and then infiltrating the weakened light squares on the queenside. White was helped greatly in his efforts in this decade by Tarrasch's "testimonial" for the Tarrasch Defense — a theoretically "correct" idea that never seemed to work out well for black. However, as the decade unfolded, black became a bit more adventurous in trying to liberate his position, above all through the Budapest Gambit, introduced in 1918. 

2. The Ruy Lopez remained, as Tarrasch put it, the other critical “milk cow” of tournament play. Again, black started to take some more liberties than he had at the height of the classical era. Thanks largely to Lasker’s initiative, the Open Ruy became a main line at St Petersburg 1914 and, in 1918, in an attempt to ambush Capablanca, Marshall uncorked his namesake gambit — one of the great opening ideas of the century. 

3. In a sense, the most interesting opening idea of the decade was the idea to basically bypass the opening altogether. Rubinstein and Capablanca played the opening with no discernible ambition — Rubinstein preferring the stolid Queen’s Pawn Game or English Opening — and then waited for asymmetries to develop somewhere around move 10 before selecting a middlegame plan.

4. The Indian Openings wouldn’t become mainstream until the 1920s, but preliminary work was being done in these lines. For the most part, black settled for a cramped position analogous to the Philidor or Steinitz Defense, but every so often seemed to come up with the "right" dynamic ideas. 

5. The “Semi-Open” games were still under a bit of cloud and Tarrasch considered them all “inferior” to 1…e5. The Sicilian was at something of a low point. The Caro-Kann was a specialty opening of Duras and Nimzowitsch’s. The French was the beneficiary of Tarrasch and Nimowitsch’s debates and became a calling card of those who were willing to try out new ideas and test the strength of cramped positions. The Rubinstein French seemed to give black an equal position with remarkable ease.