A Century of Chess: Lasker-Marshall 1907

While playing through the games of the classical period it came as something of a shock to me to realize to what extent Lasker was absent from chess for so much of his championship reign. With the sole exception of Bobby Fischer, no other world champion played as little during his reign as Lasker did in the period 1900-1907. During that time Lasker appeared in one international tournament – Cambridge Springs 1904 – in which he played well enough but finished in shared second. There was good reason to suspect that Lasker‘s time had already passed. Tarrasch, based on his result at Monte Carlo 1903 and in his 1905 match win over Marshall, claimed for himself the title of best player in the world, and tournament organizers began instituting unsubtle digs at Lasker: the 1907 Ostend winner, also Tarrasch, was crowned “tournament champion of the world.” It was common belief at the time that Lasker was afraid – that he was avoiding Tarrasch and anyone else who might take the title from him.

In retrospect, it’s more that Lasker really retired from chess after about 1900. He was dedicated to making himself a sort of universal genius, somewhat in the way that Einstein would later be perceived. He viewed his chess world championship as a stepping-stone and a calling card of genius and expected his real accomplishments to come in mathematics and philosophy. By 1907, though, Lasker had experienced a string of professional disappointments and was tight on money – and probably also missed competitive chess more than he admitted to himself. As the ever-great chess writer William Napier put it, "The invincible passion for the strife of the thing cannot always be subdued." Negotiations with Tarrasch for a 1905 match faltered over the playing site. A 1906 match with Maróczy was scuttled for reasons that have never been completely clear. Some preliminary negotiations with Marshall had been conducted in 1904 after his staggering win at Cambridge Springs. Since then, Marshall had lost much of his luster as a consequence of his drubbing by Tarrasch in their 1905 match, but he seized his chance. After his win at Nuremberg in 1906 he challenged Lasker and was accepted. 

Marshall really was a great player and his tournament record from 1904-07 was on a par with Tarrasch and Maróczy. Unfortunately, his play just wasn’t at the level of Tarrasch or Lasker, as they mercilessly demonstrated in their matches. Lasker was particularly brutal. He thoroughly outplayed Marshall in the first three games to take a commanding lead.

Marshall staunched the bleeding with a stretch of draws punctuated by another loss.

Finally, for the concluding games of the match, Marshall charged pell-mell at Lasker and haplessly dropped four consecutive games.

In his memoir Marshall, still clearly devastated 30 years later, wrote drily, “The grim business of wearing down your opponent has never appealed to me very much.” It is true that Marshall was better in tournaments than matches but that’s clearly not the whole truth, and it’s interesting to try to analyze just why Lasker was so clearly a cut above. Contemporaries mostly attributed it to psychology: Lasker, at key moments of the match (most notably in Game 2) goaded Marshall into unsound attacks. My sense is that the two players approached the game differently. Marshall was a true romantic, he liked to look deep into the position and, in the style of Nezhmetdinov or Tal, spot combinations many moves away. Lasker was like Korchnoi or Kasparov, not lacking in imagination but ceaselessly calculating variations. Marshall played a variety of “hope chess” – it worked for him against the weaker opposition in tournaments and was responsible for his famous swindles (an ability to see far-away saving ideas where other players would have already given up), but Lasker was a player of a higher order and didn’t miss a trick. There are a few sidebars of the match that I want to mention. One is that Marshall, at the end of 1906 while on a Western tour, was in a head-on collision of two trains in Louisiana, which resulted in four deaths. Marshall was unhurt and the accident occurred a full month before the match, but some observers, struck by Marshall’s poor play, thought he might have been more affected than he realized. Another, which really surprised me, is that a newspaper article at the beginning of 1907 quoted Marshall as saying that he would retire from chess if he won the match. I somehow doubt he would have carried through – Marshall continued to play competitive chess for the next four decades and it’s difficult to imagine Marshall separated from chess. It’s possible that he was influenced by Lasker’s long absence and regarded the world championship title as Lasker might have, as a crowning achievement to a career, with no advantage to be had from facing fresh challengers. Soltis reports that Marshall “trained” for the match by cutting his cigars down from 15 to 10 a day and sleeping as much as possible – 12 to 14 hours a day, which Marshall regarded as “the best training for a chess master.’