A Century of Chess: Rubinstein-Marshall 1908

As if the eight games they played against each other in the Lodz match-tournament weren’t enough, Rubinstein and Marshall next met for a match in Warsaw in October. The two players would seem to have little to do with each other – they were very different temperamentally and they belonged to different schools of chess, Marshall a born Romantic and Rubinstein the acme of classicism. Rubinstein came across as the superior player. Marshall's piece sacrifice in Game 1 led nowhere. Marshall won Game 2, copying Rubinstein's positional style, but imploded again in Game 3, and Rubinstein put together one of his positional masterpieces in Game 4 to take a two-point lead. But, towards the end of the match, Rubinstein showed his peculiar weakness again: in Game 6, in a winning position, he walked into a mate in one, just as he had in the Lodz tournament. Somewhat timidly, he drew the last two games of the tournament to hold onto a narrow one-point lead. What was odd about the match was that it was played almost entirely in secret - and the game scores had to be dug up decades later.