A Century of Chess: Dusseldorf 1908
By 1908, Frank Marshall’s limitations as a chess player were obvious. He couldn’t compete at the very highest level – as had been demonstrated in his match losses to Tarrasch and Lasker – and there was a certain lack of groundedness in his play, with the result that at the very top tournaments – at Carlsbad, Vienna, and Prague, for instance – he alternated brilliant wins with perplexing losses and finished towards the middle of the pack. But lest there be any doubt that he was a world-class player, he ran the table at the fairly strong German Chess Congress in Dusseldorf, winning eight, losing none, and finishing a point-and-a-half ahead of the rest of the field.
His wins here weren’t so much brilliant as tenacious – he had a capacity for injecting more energy into a position than his opponents could manage. The German Chess Congress had become something of a hunting preserve for Marshall. It was his second consecutive win there, again with an unbeaten score, which brought his record in that event to a staggering seventeen wins against no losses.
Georg Salwe’s place in chess history is as the early rival and sparring partner of Akiba Rubinstein. In his own tournament career, he was an avowed middle-of-the-packer with few spectacular results. One of the few was his second place finish at Dusseldorf. He never challenged Marshall but finished +5 in his customary gritty style.
Spielmann and the now-forgotten Walter John took the next places.
Dusseldorf was, tragically, the last tournament of Rudolf Swiderski, who committed suicide the next year at age 31. Swiderski was a real talent, and progenitor of hypermodernism, with an utterly unique playing style. His results in the last few years of his life were notably poor, however. He seems distracted and diffident in his games at Dusseldorf and finished in second-from-last-place.
The greatest lasting significance of the 16th German Chess Congress was as the international debut of Alexander Alekhine, then 15 years old, in the Hauptturnier.
