A Century of Chess: Lasker-Schlechter 1910

Every world championship runs the risk of the draw death. If chess is a draw, and two world-class players (both of whom, almost by definition, are capable of drawing at will) are pitted against each other without any particular incentive to tip the balance and play for a win the way that they would in a fast-paced tournament, it stands to reason that the match would peter out into a series of tepid draws, of interest only to the most fanatical chess fans - and a disaster, of course, for the match sponsors and the public. This was the problem in Kasparov-Karpov (1984), Carlsen-Karjakin (2016), and especially Carlsen-Caruana (2018). The problem first emerged in Lasker-Schlecter (1910), in which Lasker, at the height of his powers, couldn’t work up any significant advantage against Schlechter, who was playing solid, reasonable chess. Lasker nearly surrendered the match with a blunder in game 5, and then, in one of the odder twists of chess history, Schlechter, needing only a draw in game 10, played instead for a win out of a superior position and lost, allowing Lasker to retain the title. The mystery of that game has never really been resolved - it’s possible that secret match rules compelled the challenger to win by two full points; but more likely that Schlechter, in a bravura display of sportsmanship and chivalry, decided that he didn’t want to take the title by a meek draw - and it adds a great question mark over a somewhat peculiar match.

Lasker, by 1910, had spent the last three years taking a kind of match-tour of his rivals and demonstrating his clear superiority, defeating Marshall, Tarrasch, and Janowski by a combined score of +25-6=15. Schlechter was one of the few credible rivals left. He staked his claim by winning two premier tournaments in 1908, and, on the strength of those, secured funding and permission to play Lasker. In the interim, though, both players appeared at the marquee St Petersburg tournament in 1909 where Lasker finished with a staggering +11 score and Schlechter, afflicted with the flu, was good enough only for the middle of the pack. The result seemed to demonstrate Lasker’s absolute superiority over everybody other than Rubinstein and rendered the Schlechter a formality. Schlechter may have participated in that thinking as well and perceived the match as something of an exhibition of his strength rather than a genuine bid for the world championship. That gives the match something of the same character as Botvinnik-Bronstein (1951) where Bronstein, although playing very good chess, seems to have decided (in that case, for understandable political reasons) that he didn’t really want to be world champion and more or less sub-consciously tipped the match to his opponent.

Much of Lasker’s approach, particularly in his world championship matches, was to steer the game away from classically-approved dense middlegames into - how to put it? - gravitationally-weak positions, queenless middlegames and complex endgames, where a sharp tactical eye and psychological tenacity tended to prevail. That approach paid dividends in his other world championship matches, but Schlechter was well-suited for low-material positions. In the first two games he secured a significant advantage and Lasker needed some high-level defensive footwork to escape with draws.

After the third game, Lasker admitted, “For the first time in my life have I been confronted with such a problem" - meaning that Schlechter's play was so solid that Lasker felt he had no way of breaking through. In game 5 he finally seemed to be getting somewhere, but blundered.

With the match's second half, the play opened up somewhat. As black, Lasker shifted from a thorny and, from his perspective, overly intricate variation of the Ruy Lopez to the Sicilian and really startled the chess world by introducing the Sveshnikov idea (5...e5!?) in the high-stakes ninth game.

Both players were in terrific form - their mistakes were microscopic and draws well-earned. Many of the drawn games turned on advanced positional understanding, with the defending player shedding a pawn or two at the critical moment in order to create space within his position, while calculating that he was still within the margin needed to secure a draw. In particular, the match's seventh game is a jewel - and has a claim to being the most beautiful game ever played in a world championship. The sense, as later writers have observed, is that Lasker and Schlechter in this phase of the match seemed to fast-forward past about 50 years of chess history, dealing with double-edged openings and material imbalances in ways that are reminiscent of the Soviet golden era. 

As for the controversial tenth game, even Edward Winter, who usually knows everything, says that it's pretty much time to draw the veil of silence over the discussion - that we simply will never know if there was a 'two-point clause' in force. "No chess event requires greater caution by historians than the Lasker v. Schlechter match," he writes. 

But, throwing caution to the winds, I have to say that it seems fairly easy to guess what happened here. The two-point clause had been written into an earlier phase of match negotiations, when the players anticipated a match of 30 games - it seems extraordinary that it would have survived into the 10-game iteration. Lasker, for his part, was convinced that he he was about to lose the match. "The match with Schlechter is nearing its end and it appears that for the first time in my life I shall be the loser. If that happens a good man will have won the world championship," he wrote in The New York Evening Post. That piece of evidence strikes me as decisive. Lasker simply wouldn't have written that if there were a two-game clause. And, as for Schlechter's aggressive play in the 10th game, that's not so bizarre either. He was a gentleman and didn't want to win by the 'accident' of the fifth game. And, as all chessplayers know, the best way to play for a draw is to play for a win. In any case, the 10th game was, as Kasparov wrote, a 'titanic' struggle and there was never a very obvious moment when Schlechter could have just killed all the action and taken the draw.