A Century of Chess: Rubinstein-Mieses 1909
By late 1909, Rubinstein seemed invincible. He had won at Ostend-B and then at Carlsbad 1907, the first major international tournament he played in. He won a match and a match-tournament over the great Frank Marshall and a short match against Richard Teichmann. In St Petersburg 1909, he scored +11 (!) to tie for first place with Lasker - and won his individual game against Lasker. What’s more, he seemed to be winning with the absolute minimum of risk to himself, foreshortening the play into technical games where he proved to be limitlessly resourceful.
His match with Jacques Mieses seemed like a victory lap at the end of a successful chess season. Mieses was a very strong player but second-tier and utterly lacking in Rubinstein’s scientific approach. And then, shockingly, Rubinstein - who had lost only one game all year - dropped three in a row to Mieses. Rubinstein returned quickly to form and scored +5=2-0 the rest of the way to win the match fairly easily, but, still, the early rout left an aftertaste. It showed that Rubinstein was vulnerable. The 1908 match-tournament with Marshall and Salwe proved that Rubinstein was capable of egregious blunders; the match with Mieses demonstrated a certain psychological weakness - it was possible for Rubinstein to suffer spells where he lost his touch. In 1909, he was still able to fight back, but later in his career the spells would last longer and be more inexplicable.
I'll throw in one more game. This is from a short match Rubinstein played with Richard Teichmann in 1908, as a pit stop between the Jubilee tournaments at Vienna and Prague. For some reason, the match had no publicity at the time and about half the game scores are lost. The player with the white pieces won in all games but one; Rubinstein broke Teichmann's serve by drawing with the black pieces in Game 3 and went on to win the match by a point.
Sources:
-Donaldson and Minev, Life and Games of Akiba Rubinstein
-simaginfan, Two Forgotten Matches of Jacques Mieses
