A Century of Chess: Lasker-Janowski 1910

If there are any world championship matches to give back - pretend they don’t exist, erase the game scores, put all the pieces back in the box - Lasker-Janowski 1910 is at the very top of the list (the other nominees would be Steinitz-Gunsberg 1890, Alekhine-Bogoljubow 1934, the Tal-Botvinnik rematch, and Karpov-Korchnoi 1981 given the off-the-board nastiness involved).

Lasker-Janowski is its own special degree of embarrassment. The match can be understood entirely as an extension of Janowski’s gambling problem - as well as an increasing loss of contact with reality. Janowski had played an exhibition match with Lasker the year before and lost convincingly (+7-1=2) but the result somehow persuaded Janowski to double down on his bet - and he somehow persuaded his longtime patron Leo Nardus to stake him.

As the Wiener Schachzeitung archly wrote, Nardus’ stake was the only thing 'grandmasterly' about the event. The games themselves make me a bit seasick to play over - and they participate in a very specific vibe. If - to take a tour of Lasker’s rivals - playing Marshall was like being in a nicely-toned chess club with no smoking restrictions and playing Tarrasch was like being in a grand auditorium and Maróczy like a laboratory and Schlechter like a crystal palace, there’s no question what playing Janowski was like - it was like being in a city park with a degenerate and enraged gambler who also completely refuses to quit. And Lasker was many things - intellectual, philosopher, and so on - but he was also, maybe first and foremost, a hustler, and he knew how to take care of his mark, keep his composure, win his games, collect his cash.

This match is unfortunately one of the last glimpses chess history gets of these two players - and the match doesn’t put either one of them in a great light. Janowski really had been a worthy world championship contender - he had as good a tournament record as anybody in the period 1898 to 1904 - but by 1910 the gambling problem and a certain psychological instability had gotten the better of him. As Soltis writes, "Janowski's great flaw was not his extreme optimism, his obsessive devotion to the two bishops, or his haphazard endgame technique. All of those hurt him to be sure, but his worst failing was his inability to finish off a won game." And, maybe even worse than that, he had simply lost contact with competitive realities. He had decided, for some impenetrable reason, that Lasker’s chess was not chess at all - and had declared that the purpose of the 1910 match was to “distinguish between chess and dominoes.” And he had developed an image of himself as a gallant knight in the old tradition fighting gloriously for the chivalric virtues. This translated in practice into an inability to find the simple path to converting winning positions. Lasker, in a suave piece of hustle-talk, encouraged this sensibility in Janowski. "Independently he searches for the beautiful, ingenious, deep, and hidden," he wrote. "He pays not the slightest attention to ordinariness. In fact, this gives his play a special appeal, at the same time it is also his weak spot." But this whole way of looking at the match is a bit ironic given that it’s the most blitz-y of any world championship match and Janowski often comes across as a hack attacker bidding for the initiative at any price.

As for Lasker, this was his last world championship match for a decade and the last championship he won. It’s hard to fault Lasker for anything about this - his opponent, in essence, offered up a princely £400, so why not take it - but this match has not served his reputation well. It adds to the critique of Lasker that he was basically a businessman, that he tended to avoid his strongest challengers when they were at the peaks of their careers and that he wasn’t above using his title as a way to rake in cash.

The match is a glimpse also of Leo Nardus. He and Janowski really formed a pair. Nardus managed to be one of the most colorful figures ever both in the world of chess and of art - and left a swathe of confusion in both disciplines. He really was an astonishingly talented person, very well-traveled, very cosmopolitan, a bronze medalist in épée at the 1912 Olympics, a strong chess player, a gifted artist - but he was also a high-class swindler. The story - which involved scamming some of America's wealthiest people, P.A.B. Widener as well as J.P. Morgan - was very literally swept under the rug at the time and was pieced together decades later, above all in this article 'Gross False Pretenses' by Jonathan Lopez. Nardus had a real connection with a genuine art gallery, Bourgeois Frères, and he sold work from them to American collectors - but he also mixed in copies, misattributed works, and, probably, outright fakes. Widener - who I'd never heard of but who turns out per one survey to have been the 29th richest American ever, a founding organizer of U.S. Steel and the American Tobacco Company as well as many other ventures - was a somewhat credulous art collector and stocked his Lynnewood Hall with Nardus' knockoffs. In Lopez's telling, the international art market was very loosely regulated at this time, with European dealers taking a certain professional pride in manipulating their American clients, but "by virtually any standard," Lopez writes, "Nardus constituted a breed apart from other disreputable operators of the era." The fraud came to light in 1908. Widener convened an All Star panel of art experts - Cornelis de Groot to look into Nardus' Dutch work, Bernard Berenson into the Italian work, Roger Fry the English work. The assessment, ultimately, was that Widener needed to redecorate Lynnewood Hall - which he did, piecing together a fresh private collection that would rival Frick and Morgan's. There was an attempt at a lawsuit but that didn't lead to much - except that Nardus made himself scarce in America from that point forward and, in the art collection world, he became a byword for how easily collectors could be misled. But even swindlers get swindled in turn, and, in chess, Janowski somehow managed to attach himself to Nardus, to convince Nardus that his play was the quintessence of beauty in chess, and got Nardus to stake him repeatedly for, essentially, no recompense. 

As for the match itself there was really very little drama. Janowski blundered away a piece on move 22 of the first game. He played credibly to hold two draws. Then got carried away in the fourth game, launched an unjustified attack and lost. And in the fifth game - in the other great theme of the match - actually had a completely won position out of the opening but couldn’t put it away. The eighth game was his last chance to even make it a fighting match - he threw away a winning position and, as was vintage Janowski, then refused to take a perpetual check and ended up losing. The rest of the match was - as we in the NBA like to say, “garbage time" - Lasker fooling around with exotic openings and Janowski digging his own grave and behaving badly about it - spending the evenings gambling at a casino, loudly criticizing Lasker's play, and swearing that he would get him the next time. 

Sources: Chessgames.com is, as always, invaluable. Soltis has a write-up on the match in Why Lasker Matters. Jonathan Lopez's 'Great False Pretenses' on Nardus is great fun. Edward Winter has a good piece on Nardus with many examples of Nardus' chess-themed art.