A Century of Chess: Frank Marshall (from 1910-19)
Frank Marshall started the 1910s with a bracingly clear sense of what his ceiling as a player was. In match play against the super-elite players of his era — Lasker, Tarrasch, Rubinstein, Capablanca — he had a combined score of +4-27=33. That record meant that Marshall would never again be in the conversation of potential world championship candidates. He was understood to be a second-tier grandmaster — dangerous to just about anybody, terrifying in mixed-strength tournaments, but with a certain unsteadiness in his play that the best could exploit.
That evident limitation did not, however, stop Marshall from having a highly-successful rest of his career. He played in virtually all the major European tournaments of the early part of the decade, never coming worse than sixth and qualifying for the finals at St Petersburg 1914. When chess shut down in Europe, he continued to headline the thriving American chess scene, as the lone viable threat to Capablanca. Most of the time that meant a classic second-fiddle performance — tearing through the field but a point or two behind Capablanca. At New York 1911 and Havana 1913, however, the second fiddle stole the show. At New York 1911, he eclipsed Capablanca by a half-point; at Havana, he won their individual game and with it the tournament and was treated to the never-to-be-repeated experience of a Cuban crowd cheering lustily for Capablanca’s vanquisher. Marshall didn’t know what was happening, and, when he heard a roar go up, asked for escort to his hotel, thinking the crowd was out for his blood. As it turned out, though, the crowd was nothing but good sports and wanted to celebrate his achievement.
That story, as recounted in Marshall's Best Games of Chess, is like everything else Marshall wrote — the sense of life as just one vast boys’ adventure story. Marshall somehow managed to spin World War I the same way. He was at Mannheim when the war broke out, remembered the local gendarmes inviting the masters to make themselves scarce, took off for Amsterdam and then New York, losing his trunk along the way. Marshall’s main comment on the whole world cataclysm was to be startled, at the end of the war, when his trunk materialized in New York, with the contents all perfectly intact.
In a previous post, I’ve described Marshall as being basically a world class-level practitioner of ‘hope chess.’ This is what all beginning chess players are strenuously advised not to do — instead of playing ‘the truth of the position,’ to steer towards what they hope will happen. But someone with enough of a gift for combinations — and who is resourceful enough to adapt if an opponent finds the right rejoinder — can get away with it, even at an astonishingly high level. Duras could pull it off and so could Marshall. The immediate result of this style of play is that it creates games of truly stunning beauty — instead of tedious questions about ‘objective evaluations,’ the games feature long strings of combinations, some flawed but all profound, and with many more hidden offstage.
Marshall was famous above all else for his swindles. This had always been a feature of his play, but, as Andy Soltis writes, by the 1910s it had reached the level of the paranormal. Not only were his swindles effective, but the threat of swindling was equally so. For instance, in one of their match games, Janowski audibly muttered the word "swindle" after one of Marshall's moves — even though the move was a perfectly normal Morphy-esque combination as opposed to anything actually swindle-ly — and Janowski's position collapsed a few moves after that.
Marshall's decade would be long remembered for two individual moves — 23...Qg3!! in his 1912 game against Levitsky and 8...d5! in his 1918 game against Capablanca. Despite many efforts to debunk it, the "gold coins" story actually turns out to be more or less true. Many of the Russian spectators at the tournament were touting their eccentric countryman Levitsky, and, for the game against Marshall, a bet had reached a very large sum. But with Marshall's win — or with his dramatic 23rd move — "the bettors tossed over their pledges, rubles, marks, Austrian coins and similar coinage of the period minted partly or fully in gold came in the shower," as in Walter Korn's account, put together from tournament eyewitnesses.
And 8...d5 — the Marshall Gambit in the Ruy Lopez — has a fair claim to being the most consequential opening move ever invented. It would take a long time to catch on — in part from the memory of how Capablanca, fully ambushed by the move, had nevertheless clawed his way to victory in the opening's début — but it's not uncommon now to hear top players say that they have either given up the Ruy Lopez or adopted bland "anti-Marshall" lines to avoid facing black's fierce and surprisingly tenacious counterattack.
Sources: Marshall's memoir, Marshall's Best Games of Chess, has been a wonderful primary source for me for this whole era. Andy Soltis' Frank Marshall: United States Chess Champion, which relies on Marshall's unpublished notes, is almost equally so. Edward Winter has a post on Marshall here.
