A Century of Chess: Gyula Breyer from 1910-19
Richard Réti’s Modern Ideas in Chess was one of the first chess books I ever read. It’s a classic of hypermodernism, and a slim, economical work, so it was a real surprise to me when, in the middle of it, Réti embarked on a long digression about a player I had never heard of.
"In Bratislava, there appeared, for some months, a journal called Sport for the Mind,” Réti wrote. “If a person were about to take a long journey, he readily bought a copy, for with the study of a short chapter, he could pass the time occupied in the whole journey, so difficult was each line as a mental exercise. For example, in one number appeared a love letter, which when read letter for letter backwards, disclosed the original. There were keys for the discovery of secret codes and many other things of that description. There was also the following chess problem. White to play: who wins? 
"The position was complicated: all the pieces on both side were en prise, and only after a long study could it be seen that White was bound to have the advantage. Yet that was not the correct solution. On the contrary, what was apparently incredible could be proved, namely, that in the last fifty moves no piece had been taken, and no pawn could have been moved. Therefore, according to the rules of chess, it was a drawn position."
Réti continued:
"The sole editor of this paper, in which were to be found only original contributions, was Julius Breyer. And for that man, so sagacious that the finest finesses were not fine enough for him, and who at a glance saw through the most complicated conditions and had moreover at his command an untiring and intellectual capacity for work, there was only one art. In the domain of that art, he worked not only with his mind, but he cast his whole personality into it. That domain was chess."
You get the sense from Réti’s breathless account of just how important Breyer was to his generation. He was a strong player, who, by the early 1920s, was being seriously talked about as a world championship candidate, and he was a vital part of the hypermodern revolution, but the belief among his contemporaries was that Breyer’s contribution went beyond that. “Something prophetic lay in his vision and something feverish in his work,” wrote Tartakower. “Breyer’s games were truly an art form,” wrote Réti. “He was a trailblazer who infused new life into chess and led it in free and exciting directions,” wrote Jimmy Adams in his massive book on Breyer.
Breyer was born in Budapest in 1893. He was active in tournaments by 1909-10 and won an impressive simultaneous game from Lasker in 1911. In 1912, he had his breakthrough, winning the Hungarian championship, finishing shared seventh at Bad Pistyan and shared eighth at Breslau. He was shared fourth at Mannheim, had his career badly interrupted by the war, and then had his greatest result, winning the very strong Berlin tournament of 1920, shortly before his death the next year at the age of 28.
He was clearly a very strange, otherworldly figure. Marshall remembered him as “a tall, boyish, slim, and happy-looking lad.” His close contemporary Asztalos recalled that “he made few remarks but when he did always created a stir.” He seems to have gotten stalled in other aspects of his life, only finishing his university studies in his mid-20s. The sense is that he became completely consumed by chess and his need to prove that chess was, essentially, an art.
From his early experience of international tournaments, he drew the conclusion that “only a player of independent thought can be a chess master” and if he seems to have been born a hypermodern he dedicated the war years (he played, as far as anyone can tell, absolutely no role in Austro-Hungary’s war effort) to “meditations” on the essence of the openings. These were reflected in a series of paradoxical articles in which he famously applied double question marks to 1.e4, double exclamation marks to 1.d4 and double question marks to 1…d5. He also wrote essays advocating a mathematical rating system (this 50 years before ELO), a system for assessing the mathematical values of squares, a new intricate system for scoring draws, a proposal of a specialized grandmaster title for outstanding theoretical dissertations, and so on.
Breyer's Style
1.Kinetics. The real point of Breyer’s explorations was that he - more than anyone else really - discovered that chess was a ‘dynamic’ game; that it was possible to ‘store energy’ in a position and then to release it ‘kinetically’ at the right moment. This makes him a patron saint to innovative thinkers like Tony Miles, John Watson, or Mihai Suba, who, in a much later era, attempted to codify Breyer’s ideas. But he was also, in a very real sense, the truest hypermodern - occupying something of a similar position in the history of chess that Marcel Duchamp does in the history of art. In an intriguing section in Dynamic Chess, the British player R.N. Coles argues that Breyer discovered the real ideas of hypermodernism but that the movement was distorted by Nimzowitsch, while Alekhine and the Soviet School eventually brushed aside Nimzowitsch and 'found' Breyer. “The concept of the dynamic revolution which had first been aired by Breyer had tended if anything to change direction [in the hands of the Nimzowitsch school],” Coles wrote.
Under Nimzowitsch’s guidance, the hypermodern movement moved in the direction of ‘the blockade,’ of a comprehensive ‘system’ that was, in the end, a sort of mirror image to Tarrasch’s, emphasizing prophylaxis, the powers of defense and of constriction. Breyer had a different vision. Curiously, he took inspiration from the stormtrooper tactics of the later part of World War I - “the battle of the moving trench, the moving fortress, and the tanks,” he wrote. Energy would be stored, the long-range power of the bishops thoroughly respected, a position arrayed both for a fluid and flexible defense and for a rolling initiative with dynamics retained well into the endgame.
2.Paradox. Breyer was deeply drawn to truth in chess, but, for him, truth was inextricable from beauty and from paradox. As he wrote, “Beauty in chess is the unusual.” That love for paradox seems to drive many of his most outrageous moves and pronouncements. His critique of 1.e4, for instance, is based on the idea that the move actually accomplishes very little - the queen can’t be brought out for a long time, the bishop will turn out to be misplaced on c4 (it really belongs on g2, where it will be blocked by the e4 pawn), white can’t really take the d5 or f5 squares, and meanwhile d4 and f4 become vulnerable. His argument is that black has immediate equality in hand with the Rubinstein French or can play for advantage with the avant garde 1.e4 e6 2.d4 b6!!. And that love for paradox guides his most famous move - 14.Kf1?!! in his 1917 game with Esser. The move has its tactical justifications, but I somehow suspect that Breyer arrived at through higher-order reasoning. He felt that energy was balanced in the position - in fact, white pretty much has a draw by force - so that the ‘non-move’ of 14.Kf1 has no real downside, while allowing white to gain a vital, game-winning tempo in one critical variation. From Breyer’s vantage-point, the pedestrian consideration that he had already sacrificed a piece is of no particular weight - he clearly felt that dynamics, as well as concrete lines, were of utmost importance, and that the tangled position of black’s queenside meant that white was under no obligation to rush.
3.The Exchange Sacrifice. In practical terms, Breyer’s dynamics meant that he was far more willing to sacrifice the exchange than most of his contemporaries - and, of course, the dynamic exchange sacrifice would become a feature of the Soviet School decades in the future. I don’t know if Breyer articulated a theory of the exchange sacrifice, but it accords with his view of dynamics - that the relative value of the pieces is constantly shifting throughout the game and, in playing for a win, a player needs to exploit fleeting opportunities connected to the pieces’ value.
Breyer in the Opening
It’s a joke how creative Breyer was in the opening. He was innovative in the Accelerated Sicilian, Stonewall, Budapest, Veresov, Nimzowtisch, Ruy Lopez, and Indian Defenses. Curiously, Breyer wasn’t particularly interested in the opening early in his career - he seemed to believe that it would take care of itself - and that actually does help to understand his philosophy of the opening. He wasn’t looking for some prescribed best moves. He clearly believed that there were many paths to a playable middlegame. What was important, he felt, was to not prematurely release stored-up energy or to create targets (which was his critique of 1.d4 d5??) while at the same time working towards a long-range strategic vision of the game.
Breyer’s premature death - from a chronic heart condition - is one of the great losses the chess world has ever experienced. If it’s not clear that he ever really would have been a world championship candidate, he was, as Harry Golembek writes, one of the “great eccentrics” and, more than that, he was one of very few genuine chess artists.
Sources: Just about everything here comes from Jimmy Adams' Gyula Breyer: The Chess Revolutionary. Edward Winter has one of his typically detailed deconstructions of Breyer's article criticizing 1.e4. simaginfan has a nice post on him.
