A Century of Chess: Emanuel Lasker (1920-29)

I think of Lasker's career in a few distinct stages. Before 1894, he's the upstart, a young coffee klatsch Berliner playing a kind of un-genteel but unstoppable chess. From 1894 to 1900, he's the usurper, the legitimate world champion but not quite how anybody pictured a chess world champion. From 1900 to 1907, he's in semi-retirement, trying to make his way as a mathematician or academic, and with the whispers growing about his unwillingness to play. From 1907 to 1914, he's the rightful champion, playing a series of matches with each of his major rivals and scoring +34-6=24 in an astonishing display of dominance and then holding on even against the insurgent Capablanca to narrowly win at St Petersburg 1914. From 1914 to 1921, it's interregnum, with Lasker eager, actually, to be done with the world championship and get on with his life — even offering to just hand off the title to Capablanca without a match. But Capablanca wanted greater legitimacy than that and insisted — and the 1921 match, although largely forgotten in chess history and a clean victory for Capablanca, was actually one of the highest-level matches ever played. Lasker didn't win a game, and never even had a winning position, but even his losses were impressive — like this game where, facing the collapse of his position, he embarked on the kind of sacrifice that wouldn't have occurred to any other player and made a sharp game of it. 

In spite of his cavalier attitude towards the world championship heading into the match, Lasker got caught up in the competitive sport and ended up being a poor sport — blaming the heat in Cuba for his defeat. But he really needed no alibi. Capablanca was at the peak of his career and close to invincible. As Lasker himself had remarked to him in 1914, "It is remarkable. You make no mistakes." 

After the loss of the world championship, Lasker entered into the extended final phase of his career in which, as Olga Capablanca would remark, he "conducted himself with the dignity of an old lion." That phase really represents the enduring image of Lasker — the unruly, Einsteinian white hair; the permanent bohemianism; the inevitable cigar; the hint of a rakish cosmopolitanism in a flatter, more scientific age; and his absolute indestructibility as a competitor. He was 52 when he lost the title, had nothing else to prove in chess, and might have been expected to slink off into retirement. Instead, he won by a full point against a very strong field at Maehrisch-Ostrau 1923, won the strongest tournament of the decade at New York 1924 in which he lost his individual game to Capablanca but finished a point-and-a-half ahead of him, and then came clear second at Moscow 1925. That combined tournament score of +31-2=19 — against the very best in the world and while well into his 50s — is dizzying, certainly among the very best performances ever for a player of his age, and a critical body of evidence to make the case that Lasker was among the top five or so players of all time. 

I've written elsewhere that Lasker's play by this time was like that of a pool shark who knows every bend of the table and divot of felt and can hit shots that no one else would even attempt. By this time most other players had given up on even understanding how he won the games that he did — with Max Euwe famously saying, "There is nothing to be learned from Lasker, one can only stand and wonder." But if we try to be a little more scientific about it we can come up with the following: 

1.Imbalances. The typical Lasker game — like a typical Capablanca game, actually — only seems to start around move 12. Lasker, although he was capable of opening innovation, tended to treat the opening with indifference — and never more so than in the '20s, when he was clearly out of the loop on hypermodern theory. He reached some kind of middlegame where he might temporarily stand worse but where, more critically, the features of the position were apparent and he could grab onto whatever was most important. That was never so extreme as in this game against Tarrasch, which epitomized their entire relationship, where Tarrasch, by all rights, should have blasted Lasker off the board in the opening but instead missed the decisive moment and Lasker, without Tarrasch's having obviously done anything so terrible, steadily took over the position. 

2.Queenless middlegames, complex endings. A great deal of Lasker's allegedly 'psychological' approach was more about turning games into the kinds of positions that even many masters were unfamiliar with and where experience alone was helpful. These were the kinds of messy complex endgames that almost never appear in textbooks and where the only way to really get oriented in the position is with ceaseless activity. Lasker was often able to win in these positions even with significant material deficits. 

3.Playing under pressure. Well, this one isn't such a 'scientific' analysis of Lasker's style, but throughout his career he always rose to the moment, controlling his nerves better in decisive games than his opponents did. We can get a feel for what that was like in his game against Réti at Maehrisch-Ostrau, which decided first place in the tournament, and against Rubinstein at Moscow, which was so avidly followed by the spectators that they burst into loud applause after his victory. In games like these, Lasker tended to choose loose structures with plenty of room for both sides to go wrong and then — even if his own play was hardly mistake-free — to rely on his capacity for defensive resourcefulness. 

Sources: There is a brief reminiscence of Lasker in Gennady Sosonko's Russian Silhouettes. Andrew Soltis discusses competing views of Lasker's style in Why Lasker Matters.