A Century of Chess: Rudolf Spielmann (1920-29)

Spielmann, I have said, was maybe the most amusing chess player of his era. He seems to have been a very simple person who liked his beer and his creature comforts and for some reason played a wild, adventuring chess. "Spielmann plays always like an educated cave-man, who fell asleep several thousand years ago — and woke up quite lately in the Black Forest," wrote the ever-wonderful William Napier. His results were always impossible to predict. In international tournaments in the ‘20s, he finished fourth-from-last at Gothenburg 1920, dead last at Berlin 1920, then suddenly shared second in a very strong tournament at Bad Pistyan and shared first at Teplitz-Schönau 1922, then fell back to shared tenth at Vienna 1922, completely bombed to come last at Carlsbad 1923, and was only ninth at Maehrisch-Ostrau 1923, shared eleventh at Baden-Baden 1925 , seventh at Marienbad 1925, shared twelfth at Moscow 1925, then confounded everybody by winning outright at Semmering 1926, fell back to fifth at New York 1927, and all the way to tenth at Bad Kissingen 1928, before suddenly vaulting back to shared second with Capablanca at Karlsbad 1929. It wasn't just that he would swing widely between tournaments, he would have pronounced hot and streaks within tournaments themselves, and, for instance, peppered his Bad Kissingen debacle with a defeat of Capablanca. It was a bit hard to understand what was going on. Capablanca probably offered the most correct analysis when he wrote that Spielmann "had a tendency to be discouraged when things do not go his way," while Spielmann offered the more novel theory that "it is only against me that opponents display their full strength." 

Chess players tended to regard Spielmann as an atavism, like some final cavalry charge out of the Romantic past. Nimzowitsch claimed that, try as he might, he could never get Spielmann to see the value of defense. Stahlberg wrote, "He seemed to love fighting and danger for their own sake." Spielmann himself sounded a defiant, John Henry-ish note when he claimed, "If each and every sacrifice had to be of that cast-iron soundness which can be verified by analysis, it would be necessary to banish from the game of chess that proud and indispensable prerogative of the fighter: enterprise." But it’s possible that Spielmann much more significant in chess history than is usually acknowledged. He almost single-handedly kept alive ideas of the attack, the sacrifice, the initiative, the material imbalance in an era when overly-narrow ideas about positional balance held sway in chess. If we look at the games of Tal or Kasparov, it’s possible to see Spielmann’s distant influence in them — and if we look at the way modern computers play, it's clear that Spielmann was more right about the inherent imbalances at the heart of chess than many of his contemporaries were with their more 'scientific' beliefs.

The end of Spielmann’s life was truly heartbreaking. Jewish, he kept fleeing from Nazism. From Prague in 1938, he wrote to an acquaintance in Sweden, “The only thing that keeps me alive is the hope, that someday I will find work connected with chess. It's the only thing I can do!" But even in Sweden he couldn’t escape desperation. Two of his siblings died in concentration camps. Spielmann, in dire straits, died in 1942 — apparently by starving himself to death.

Spielmann's Style 

1.Va Banque. Spielmann really played only one way — ever forward, looking only, said Nimzowitsch, for developing and attacking moves. But let's divide his games into a few different headings. Here, against Capablanca, he seizes the first opportunity given to him to lurch forward and create an attacking position. 

2.The Joy of the Sacrifice. Spielmann wrote a whole book dedicated to the art of the sacrifice and here are a couple of games in which he joyously parts with material. 

3.On The Knife's Edge. And here is Spielmann mixing it up with similarly tactically-inclined players — reaching the sorts of positions where only imagination and courage prevail. 

Sources: Jeremy Silman has a nice page on Spielmann here and Edward Winter here. Richard Réti discusses Spielmann in Masters of the Chessboard.