A Century of Chess: Khan-Tartakower 1931
Come to think of it, Savielly Tartakower and Sultan Khan were somewhat similar players — both wildly creative and with a gift for playing all across the board. They ended up paired together at Liège 1930, with Khan leading most of the way, then Tartakower overtaking him and winning their last-round encounter. That was so fun that they must have been inspired to continue the play with a separate match held in Vienna.
Gideon Stahlberg would sniff that “in chess terms the match Tartakower-Khan was simply disappointing,” and it’s true that the quality of play was uneven, but an assessment like that misses the excitement of the play. Tartakower was the liveliest grandmaster of the era, constantly experimenting in the opening and playing always for complications and hidden resources. Khan, though, was something different. He had learned to play in India, following rules of a completely different evolutionary branch from the European game, and his chess often seemed to come from the future — he embraced hypermodern openings and found dynamics in the position that remind one of chess in the ‘70s, if not of computer chess. As Tartakower wrote after the match, “My adversary possessed peerless tenacity and imagination.”
Tartakower drew first blood, winning in the kind of game where he seemed to completely outclass his opponent. In the second game, though, Khan seemed to be the one playing at a high level — choosing the Taimanov Variation as black, he exchanged immediately down to a favorable ending and won without breaking a sweat.
Tartakower pulled ahead in Game 4 by better keeping his wits in a queenless middlegame, but in Game 5 Khan evened up again by playing a masterpiece of an endgame — a real model of how a knight can outplay a bad bishop.
Tartakower missed a win a Game 6 and then in Game 8 Khan pulled ahead for the first time, defanging a Tartakower pawn sacrifice out of a Caro-Kann. After two more draws, Khan played weakly allowing Tartakower to crush through in a game he called “the massacre.”
That set up a decisive twelfth game, but if Khan’s competitiveness had seemed in question at Liège, his nerves held here. Tartakower overplayed his hand out of the opening, sacrificing a pawn for compensation that never materialized, and Khan won smoothly.
The result was exciting enough that Khan’s backers seriously considered a challenge for the world championship, but that fell into abeyance after a match loss to Flohr in 1932.
Sources: Daniel King wrote a book on Khan that can be read here. Tartakower discusses the match in My Best Games of Chess. Chessgames.com has a very good write-up of the match w.
