A Century of Chess: Nuremberg 1906

At the end of 1905 Marshall suffered a humiliating match loss to Tarrasch +1-8=8. He re-proved himself as one of the world’s best with a runaway victory at the very strong Nuremberg Chess Congress - the site of the Tarrasch match. He won nine, lost none, and finished a full point and a half ahead of the field. His games in the tournament demonstrate incredible power and control, and - as so often happens in tournaments - many of his points came from precisely played, active endgames.

The other sensation of the tournament was Duras. A year earlier he had been placed in the C section of the Barmen tournament (which he duly won). Now, he was clearly one of the world’s best, finishing clear second ahead of Schlechter, Tarrasch, Janowski, and Chigorin, among many others. There’s something very pleasurable in playing over Duras’ games - he has a mosquito style, like Mecking or Teichmann. He enters into imbalanced positions and seems always to stay a tactic ahead of his opponent.

This tournament serves also as a changing of the guard. Tarrasch had an inexplicably weak showing, finishing ninth while Janowski shared last place. The corps that dominated elite chess for the last decade was beginning to show signs of decline, and the new generation - Duras, Spielmann, Forgács, Vidmar - were proving themselves fully capable of competing at top level. Fans of the older generation were pleased by the strong performance of Chigorin, who débuted the Chigorin Variation of the Ruy Lopez in a game he won against Duras.

The tournament was marred by a really terrible rule experiment - the brainchild of the meddlesome journalist Leopold Hoffer. The idea was to keep clocks but abolish time forfeits - if a player was close to having his time expire he could buy extra time from the tournament. Tarrasch was the chief victim of this innovation - finding himself struggling in an inferior position against Salwe and short on time he kept paying for an extension. He ended up losing the game - and paying 95 marks for the privilege. Because of this rule, the American Chess Bulletin announced, a bit dramatically, that the tournament was "indeed a failure."