A Century of Chess: Richard Réti (1920-29)
Richard Réti was born in 1889 to a Jewish Austro-Hungarian family in what's now Slovakia and was raised mostly in Vienna. As a six-year-old, he pulled the Capablanca/Smyslov trick of watching his older family members play a chess game and then correcting their mistakes. The family largely forgot about his chess-playing, but, when he was 12, were puzzled by an ongoing correspondence he had with an elderly newspaper editor. When they opened one of the letters, they discovered a note — from Hermann von Gottschall — reading "Your problem is gratefully accepted and will be published in one of our next columns. And I wish to add that if it is really true that you are only 12 years of age, as you wrote, and nobody helped you with the problem, let me congratulate you wholeheartedly."
The Gottschall letter inspired his older brother Rudolph (from whose wonderful account of Réti's upbringing most of these details are taken) to write to Carl Schlechter and arrange a meeting. The encounter, at Schlechter's house, went almost exactly as one would expect between two chess geniuses. "After several minutes of complete silence — in this respect the two adepts, as I noticed, were rather alike, for they were both reluctant to speak — Schlechter said: 'Well, what else is there to do? Let’s play.'"
Réti lost both games but held his own and Schlechter suggested his admission to the Wiener Schachklub. For a while, Réti seemed to be something of a favorite son, but at the Vienna jubilee tournament of 1908 he finished dead-last with a score of +0-16=3 — one of the worst performances ever by a top-flight player. This seemed to mark him as "a certain loser," wrote Rudolph, and Réti himself drifted away from chess and focused on mathematics.
The war, however, may have saved Réti's chess career. He was assigned to clerical duty in an outpost in Serbia, but, as Rudolph wrote, "as it happened, several of his superior officers were intensely interested in the game, and it was due to their encouragement and leniency that he was able to take part in an occasional tournament which might otherwise have been out of bounds to him." As far as I can tell, he seems to have dedicated a great deal of his military service to thinking through chess on the sort of molecular level and, by war’s end, has developed a sophisticated, radically new approach to chess that rivaled Nimzowitsch’s. According to Rudolph, he had in fact intuited the ideas of hypermodernism long before its formal unveiling. "In probing deeper into the mystery of the 64 squares it gradually occurred to me that certain moves and systems of development which did not open more terrain for one’s game or rescue one from the opponent’s attack could nevertheless, if properly handled, finally lead to a superior position," Réti told his brother. "In other words, there is often a higher, more complex logic hidden in chess than in the obvious logic of common sense."
Réti's approach debuted at Gothenburg 1920. It was the first major tournament after the war, and of immense excitement across the chess world, and Reti’s stunning first place win was in some ways the high-water mark of hypermodernism. It showed that there really was a new way of playing chess and that many of the classical players were now left behind. It was also, unfortunately, a high-water mark of Réti’s career. He would be an elite player for the next decade but never again won a major tournament. That step backwards in Réti’s career is a little hard to understand. One way to discuss it is just that he didn’t have the tactical firepower of some of his peers and could get outplayed (in an amusing reminiscence, Réti would declare that he had no genius or even talent but only hard work). Another factor — strange to say — is that Réti was significantly better with white than black. As white, Réti built up complicated positional structures that seemed to overwhelm an opponent almost from the opening. As black, he seemed often to play from a place of fear, as if worrying that his opponents would do to him as he did when he was white, and he tended to fall into passive constructions. The great innovations in black’s play in the opening — the Indian systems above all — would come later and from different players. But the most critical reason for Réti’s relative failure as a tournament player is simply that the practical side of chess was less interesting to him than its theoretical aspects. Réti — as Rudolph's account demonstrates — often seemed to be living in a different dimension. His second calling was higher mathematics and the way he played chess often seemed to be in reference to some highly-abstract higher geometry of the game that was invisible even to many of the strongest masters. This was illustrated most clearly in his head-breaker of an endgame problem — probably the most famous study ever created — in which white is able to draw in this simple king-and-pawn endgame. The secret to the puzzle is about inner harmonies within the deeper geometry of the game that go well beyond surface arithmetic.
Réti’s draw with Alekhine — maybe the greatest draw ever played — can be thought of as a practical demonstration of the same ideas.
Other players were similarly struck, when playing Réti, by the sense of being in a rarefied atmosphere. Spielmann wrote, "In almost every game he played against me he invented something new. Very frequently, and within just a few moves, I would find myself in a lost position against him without knowing exactly how it had happened." Rudolph recalled how Réti's search for the inner truth of chess — which he thought of as a parallel investigation to modern ideas in art or Einstein's theory of relativity — interfered with his results as a practical player. "It is understandable that this whole chain of thought became gradually paramount in my brother’s mind and overshadowed the chessplayer’s normal desire to win the game," Rudolph wrote. "Often in an important move on which his final score in a tournament or match might depend he would blithely try a new system of exposition – just as an experiment. If as a result he lost the game, his thought by no means revolved around the chance he had missed, but rather around the question of whether, by a slight maneuver, or perhaps by an exchange of two moves, his idea could still possibly prove valuable."
In the history of chess, then, Réti occupies a very special place — maybe somewhat similar to where somebody like Wassily Kandinsky is in art. He was a charter member of the elite, part of the world’s top ten (or twelve) for the 1920s but his real contribution was in other domains — in his writing (Masters of the Chessboard is one of the best chess books ever written, maybe the first really systematic attempt to treat chess players as artists of ideas, and incidentally a major influence on this blog) and then in the higher theory of the game, with Réti finding some of its innermost secrets, largely discovering hypermodernism, dynamism, and the abstract geometry of chess that the most innovative players of later generations would build upon. He died at age 40 of scarlet fever, at which time, claimed Rudolph, he was only starting to really dive deep into chess. "A kind of restless melancholy, perhaps not visible to the outside world but clearly felt by those who knew him well, finally took hold of him," Rudolph wrote, but that melancholy — which was closely attached to his discomfort with practical tournament play — did not extend to the game itself. "To be sure, his love for chess not only did not subside but even increased with the years to an ardent, consuming passion," Rudolph wrote.
Réti's Style
1.Encirclement — Réti became famous for an approach in the opening that can be thought of as ‘encirclement.’ He avoided directly playing with pawns in the center, and almost as if he were playing GO and trying to surround all the enemies’ pieces, grabbed queenside space, placed his pieces on the wings and used wing play in order to undermine an opponent’s apparently strong central position. Réti’s most famous maneuver in this vein is his play against Capablanca in 1924, placing a bishop on b2, swinging his queen to the queenside, and using that pressure on the long diagonal to support eventual operations in the center.
2.Delayed fuse — Réti’s wing play, and his encircling maneuvers, left a deep impression on the chess world and made it difficult to grasp the maybe-more-fundamental aspect of his play, which is the delayed fuse. It will be noticed in hypermodern games that the players often do break with pawns in the center — it’s just that those breaks tend to come around move 15 or 20 as opposed to on move one or two. The delayed fuse idea is based around storing up potential energy within one’s own constricted position, letting one’s opponent lose elasticity within their overextended position and then striking in a way where all energy is flowing into that contested spot on the board. Réti’s games had a way of being settled very quickly — he was, in a sense, working out the idea of the ‘critical moment’ — and the feeling is often of a martial arts expert breaking a board very close to his fist, of Réti putting all his energy into the single coiled blow.
3.Positional architecture — The Réti Opening, Réti's most obvious contribution to chess theory, rests above all on a combination of positional solidity and flexibility. White very much stays within his own ranks, shuffling pieces around for much of the opening, but he is constantly ready to grab queenside space and encircle or else to strike in the center if his opponent gives him the opportunity.
Sources: My main source here is a memoir written by Rudolph Réti and published by Edward Winter. Winter has this additional post on Réti. Réti's two famous books are Modern Ideas In Chess and Masters of the Chessboard.
