A Century of Chess: Milan Vidmar (1920-29)

In my piece on Vidmar for “Chess in the 1910s,” I argued that Vidmar may well be the most underestimated player in chess history. He confirms that somewhat whimsical status with his performance in the 1920s — by my metric (head-to-head matchups against the world’s elite), he was the #4 player in the world through the 1910s and #7 through the 1920s. That’s a truly remarkable record of high-performing consistency for a master whom Jan Timman condescendingly called "a not very brilliant player." 

In my piece on Vidmar in the 1910s I listed the qualities leading to underestimation as the following:

-Vidmar came from a small country (Slovenia);

-He was an amateur (his primary work was as an electrical engineer and by the late 1920s he had risen to the position of chancellor at Ljubljana University);

-He had a positional style with the result that very few of his wins were anthologized;

-He kept an orderly life and generated very few stories;

-He never won a major international tournament.

In the 1920s, Vidmar added the gift for being inconspicuous to the art of underestimation. He played in relatively few tournaments and then seemed to slip unnoticed into the upper middle of the pack, finishing third at London in 1922, then, after another long absence, returning to chess to finish third at Semmering 1926, fourth at New York 1927 where he posted the Giri-esque score of 14 draws in 20 games, fourth at London 1927, shared fifth at Karlsbad 1929. It’s to be noticed that Vidmar never had a bad tournament although also never exactly stood out from the field. 

At times Vidmar’s tendency to be overlooked verged on the absurd. His book Goldene Schachzeiten, an absolutely invaluable resource on this period from the different excerpts I’ve read, may well be the best chess book never translated into English. Capablanca kind of ruined Vidmar’s entire reputation by remarking, "He always gives me a chance of a brilliancy. He is my meat." Less well known is that Capablanca also said, “I am lucky that he is torn between engineering and chess; otherwise, my title would be seriously threatened." Alekhine meanwhile wrote, "He has a certain good-natured rustic slyness characteristic of his Slovene countrymen. All told he is, perhaps, no lion in the realm of chess, but he is highly dangerous to those who permit themselves to be intimidated by his apparent harmlessness." And C.J.S. Purdy in 1936 unfavorably compared Vidmar to younger, more "electric" players by calling him just "a divinely-gifted wood-shifter" — which is, by the way, an absurd statement. Trying to figure out the line between the geniuses and the talented wood-shifters is almost exactly like trying to decide whether someone is the world’s shortest giant or tallest dwarf. I have a strong suspicion that the character of Czentovic in Stefan Zweig’s The Royal Game is based to some extent on Vidmar — he was the only prominent Yugoslav player of that era and Czentovic’s rustic ways somewhat match the description of Vidmar’s simplicity of manner, unexpected in either a grandmaster or university chancellor. 

As I’ve said before, Vidmar represents something like the triumph of common sense in chess. He never does anything fancy — hypermodernism, for instance, passed him entirely by. He plays the opening looking to gain space and to find sharpness in the position. He is particularly attuned to time in chess — many of his annotations have musical references in them — and I picture him humming to himself as he played, sometimes picking up the tempo, sometimes falling into more languorous stretches, almost exactly as in a waltz. 

Vidmar also had an ability to be comfortable in mess, and this seems to place him in the company of players like Lasker or Korchnoi, who never lost their heads in chaotic positions and who always found their way by constantly calculating with precision. 

Sources: Edward Winter has a page on Vidmar here. simaginfan has a pair of posts on Vidmar here and here, including notes translated from German. Vidmar's classic Goldene Schachzeiten is available in German only.