A Century of Chess: Karlsbad 1911
There has probably never been a chess player as consistent as Richard Teichmann. He was born on the same day as Emanuel Lasker, also in Berlin, and spent his career as Lasker’s mini-me: consistently one of the top ten players in the world but never a real candidate for the world championship. He became most famous as Richard the Fifth - for his remarkable record of finishing fifth in eight (!) tournaments, which would seem to be a numerical fluke but actually encapsulates Teichmann’s strength and style perfectly. He had a sharp tactical eye, was a gifted middlegame skirmisher, and a well-rounded player, but there’s something a bit lazy in his play: in his games he never seems to come up with some deep plan or to really play brilliantly. But once - just once in his career, at the super-strong marathon Karlsbad tournament with its field of 26 players, Teichmann won a major tournament and laid his claim to being among the world’s true elite.
It was an astonishing performance by Teichmann. He won thirteen games against two losses and coasted to a win by a full point notwithstanding a last-round loss. The tournament showcased all of his qualities: a capacity for knife-fighting in the middle game, tactical skill, and superior endgame technique. These were always Teichmann’s attributes but in every other tournament they balanced out and a decent percentage of his opponents outfoxed him. But at Karlsbad, with Teichmann in form and facing a field of diffuse strength, he was virtually unbeatable.
Rubinstein, who was right at his peak, had a superior tournament and would have taken clear second if he had been able to convert the point in his last-round game, an endgame a pawn ahead against Rabinovich. Instead, Schlechter, also at his peak, caught him with an elegant attacking win over Jaffe.
Teichmann aside, the sensation of the tournament was the young Polish player Georg Rotlewi. Rotlewi, now best known for being on the losing side of “Rubinstein’s Immortal,” had the tournament of his career at Karlsbad. The story is that Rotlewi was well on his way to becoming a sensation - he was in shared first after 17 rounds and attracting greater and greater notice. Lasker himself - who was usually unerring in his judgments - predicted great things for Rotlewi, writing, "He fights without concerns and with naive belief in his star, as brave as a Swabian crusader when surrounded by his enemies. He brings a fresh breeze into the arena of chess contests." But Rotlewi's family was very poor and he had appeared at the tournament in clothes that, as Grigory Levenfish recalled, "were quite evidently those of a younger brother." Tietz, the tournament's organizer, decided that this would not do at all and fronted Rotlewi some prize money to buy a fresh suit. But, Levenfish continued, "Tietz had done Rotlewi no favor. Having become a dandy, the latter now partook of the pleasures of spa life and grew unfit for serious chess. Soon after the tournament ended Rotlewi fell prey to depression. Thus ended the career of a most talented master."
The story may be exaggerated slightly. But it is true that he lost a late-round game to Teichmann, which knocked him out of contention for first place, then lost again in the last round, and never had a similar result again.
The great German writer Ernst Junger knew Rotlewi in the years after the tournament - he was a friend of Junger’s father - and remembered him as being the most melancholic person he ever met. When Junger finally asked him why he was so sad, Rotlewi quoted Schiller's line, "What is a life that love does not enlighten?"
The tournament was an important coming-of-age moment for two of the great stars of the next generation: Alexander Alekhine and Aron Nimzowitsch. The 18-year-old Alekhine proved himself an elite player at one of his first international tournaments, finishing with a plus score, and winning several games in what would be his signature slashing style.
At 24, Nimzowitsch was already a veteran of the international scene, but at Karlsbad his stylistic experiments became more pronounced. As white he played the French Advance Variation, welcoming the central exchanges and the dissipation of the central pawn structure that he would champion in My System. Between Nimzowitsch and Tartakower - who was essaying Bird’s Opening throughout the tournament - it becomes possible to speak of hypermodern chess and a style of play distinct from the rest of the field. Nimozwitsch’s personal eccentricities had also become more pronounced. He was very concerned about his constant problem of losing his pencils and pioneered a contraption for keeping score that was described as "a metal scaffold that looks like a small gallows but features a hanging device for fashioning a pencil." This device caused a degree of chaos in the tournament - enough so that Teichmann, for his game against Nimzowitsch, insisted on keeping score with a typewriter.
It was also the international debut for Grigory Levenfish and Borislav Kostic, players whose impact on chess would be well off in the future.
As for brilliancies, the most dazzling games were by players who had otherwise only ok tournaments - Duras and Spielmann.
And the comedy at the end of an evening of drama.
Karlsbad came in for an interesting critique from John Nunn. Nunn was trying to figure out how players from the classical era would stack up against the present-day. He took Karlsbad 1911 as his test case and came up with a withering assessment based primarily on the games of Hugo Suechting, an after-thought but by no means a completely easy point. "Having played over all his games at Karlsbad I think I can confidently state that his playing strength was not greater than ELO 2100 - and that was on a good day and with a head wind," Nunn writes. Nunn's conclusion from this truly surprising attack on poor, unoffending Hugo Suechting was to caluminate the entire classical era. "To summarize, the old players were much worse than I expected," writes Nunn. "The blunders thrown up by Fritz were so awful that I looked at a considerable number of complete games 'by hand,' wondering if the Fritz results really reflected the general standard of play. They did."
This is a bit painful for me to read - since the whole premise of this series is that there is a great deal to learn from classical chess, and I have a suspicion that the snobby modern grandmasters may basically be right, that chess has advanced so much, particularly in the computer age, that a study of classical chess isn't all that useful (or at least the best use of time) for practical players. Against Nunn's perspective, there is the counter-argument of Vladimir Kramnik, sort of purist and sort of mystical, that, "If a player wants to achieve much, he should live through the entire history of chess in his thoughts. I can't explain it from a purely logical standpoint, but in my opinion you have to experience the entire history."
From my point of view, though, it's not really necessary to puzzle all this out. Chess history is of value not just as pedagogy for improving players. Studying games from the classical period is a bit like looking at, say, art from the early Renaissance. The interest isn't so much contrasting technique with later eras as following the way that the technique, and the theory of the game, develops. Players of the classical era didn't have Fritz and they didn't have the benefit of the next century of the development of chess. They were doing the best with what they did; and, very often, they managed to produce chess of startling beauty.
Sources: There's lots out there on Karlsbad. A few useful resources are Skoldager and Nielsen's Aron Nimzowitsch: On The Road To Chess Mastery, Kmoch's Rubinstein's Chess Masterpieces, Marshall's Fifty Years of Chess. Maybe best of all are the Levenfish reminiscences. Karlsbad, incidentally, would loom largely in his memory - it was the only time, throughout his long career, that he played abroad.
