A Century of Chess: Jacques Mieses (1900-1909)
After Chigorin and before Spielmann there was Mieses - keeper of the flame of the Romantic School.
Mieses was born in Leipzig in 1865. According to Gabriel Velasco, he switched his name in his mid-20s from Jakob to his middle name Jacques because it "better fit his outgoing personality, stylish dress, and colorful, combinative style of play." By the period I'm dealing with, he was already a mainstay of the international chess scene, "an erratic player even at my best," as he later recalled, usually finishing somewhere towards the middle of the pack but perfectly capable of either delivering or being on the receiving end of brilliancies - and, actually, this is how he was first introduced to me: in compendiums of the classical era he and Georg Marco seemed to trail behind only to N.N. in suffering famous defeats.
The sense I have with Mieses is that he was basically a hobbyist - he came from a generation that regarded chess as a pastime, and the advent of professionalism and of the modern style would have struck him oddly. The internal compromise that he seemed to have made with himself was to focus on the Brilliancy Prize - in a career lasting over sixty years he won only major event (Vienna 1907) but, by simaginfan's count, nabbed eight Brilliancy Prizes. And, for chess connoisseurs, there was something truly delectable in the way that Mieses structured his attacks. Reinfeld wrote that there was "a uniquely glamorous quality about a Mieses combination," Tartakower annotated one of his victories as "a true Mieses game - dashing and elegant!"
Mieses fled the Nazis in 1938 and had a kind of Indian Summer in England in the last decade of his life. He had never been a very good writer and his quotes from his glory days have a certain Wilhelmine heaviness to them, but in England everybody was charmed by his wit and dignified manner. Most of the anecdotes about him date from this period. Asked about what had happened when a tram hit and maimed him in 1937, he said, "It was my turn to move." Delivering a toast for his 80th birthday, he said, "Most people are likely to die between 70 and 80. Hence I dare say that I have passed the danger zone and may go on living forever." When, as an 84-year-old, he won a game against an 86-year-old, he declared, "Youth has been victorious." And so on. A particularly nice reminiscence of him at this time comes from Heinrich Fraenkel who sat next to Mieses during a swindling victory of his in 1945 and, decades later, wrote, "I'll never forget the old boy's poker face when he tricked his opponent into that little trap."
Mieses was in the right place/right time to earn a spot in the inaugural grandmaster class of 1950 - and was treated, as The British Chess Magazine wrote in his obituary, as "the last surviving link with a distant and largely forgotten era," like the sort of secondary character who gives the final speech in a Shakespeare play.
Mieses' Style
1. The Line-Clearing Sacrifice
Actually, the grandmaster title may have been pushing things slightly. I think of Mieses more as a patron saint of club players - and I've personally found very helpful his practical-minded advice: "It is a very well-known matter of experience that losing a pawn in the opening by a mistake is often the involuntary equivalent of playing a quite-promising gambit." But of course Mieses often gave up material voluntarily as well, as in his pet Danish Gambit.
2. Material Imbalances
Much of the distinctive Mieses attack seems to be about dedicating the early stage of the game to dynamic imbalances - say, three pawns for a piece or rook for two minor pieces - and then efficiently harmonizing his own pieces in the ensuing disorder.
Mieses in the Opening
More than anything else, Mieses' enduring legacy is in his relentless advocacy of certain patzerish openings that were already being abandoned by the 1900s but were not nearly so bad as the classicists tended to make them out to be. These were varieties of the Center Game - Danish Gambit, Scotch Game, Scandinavian Defense - and the Vienna Gambit. A google of Mieses finds him all over even very present-day opening books pushing these lines on club players.
Just a note about what I'm up to. This is part of a much longer series 'A Century of Chess' moving at a stately pace through chess history from 1900 until (in theory) at least 1999. I've gone through the tournaments and matches of the period 1900-1909 and put together a completely insane crosstable ranking the top players of the era. Now, in the spirit of a VH1 Behind The Music countdown, I'm working my way up from #16 (Mieses) to #1 (Lasker) and writing up biographies of each of these players with games restricted to this decade only. As always, the emphasis is on the contribution of each player to the evolution of chess theory.
