A Century of Chess: Rudolf Spielmann (from 1910-1919)
In Masters of the Chessboard, here’s how Richard Réti describes Spielmann:
"Spielmann seeks the salvation of chess in a return to the style of the old masters. He is the last bard of the gambit game. Today his intentions and achievements can already be appraised from the historic point of view. He brought to his undertaking every necessary gift: not only great imagination and a talent for combinations but also unusual resourcefulness in complicated situations, in which he felt perfectly at home. But he was thwarted in his real aspiration. He obtained his best results against weaker opponents, who lost their heads in complicated positions. The games he won in the old style are very interesting but not convincing and for that reason he could not create a school. The past is dead, but in the history of chess Spielmann will have a place of honor as the last upholder of the romantic tradition."
The sense with Spielmann was that he was a freak - a barbarian, a dinosaur, a holdover from a different era. Napier called him "an educated caveman who fell asleep several thousand years ago and wake up quite lately." To his contemporaries he was funny in other respects as well. He was, in nearly all accounts, a very simple person. He liked his beer, he liked his fatty foods. It was as if some beerhall potzer staggered to the board and just so happened to be a chess genius.
In retrospect, Spielmann wasn’t quite such an oddity. Fundamentally, his contemporaries were wrong about chess. They believed that Steinitz and Tarrasch - and certainly Rubinstein and Capablanca - had figured out the inner logic of the game and proved the unsoundness of sacrifices and gambits. But, as was subsequently revealed, there are many different ways to play, and Spielmann was for a long time the lonely torchbearer of the combinative approach, which would then get picked up by players like Tal, Spassky, and Stein.
Spielmann was from an upwardly-mobile Jewish Austrian family. His brother was a violin prodigy and, as a child, Spielmann was clearly gifted at both chess and mathematics. He had his first breakthrough as an adult with a third-place finish at Scheveningen 1905 and then secured a steady string of tournament invitations but without particularly impressing. He vaulted forward with a shared third at St Petersburg 1909 and then, with a win at Abbazia 1912, shared second at San Sebastián 1912, and clear second at Bad Pistyan 1912, he made clear that he was fully capable of winning tournaments.
Spielmann came up with Nimzowitsch, and Capablanca thought of them in the same breath - as "the best two exponents of the brilliance of the old school, under the theory of the modern school." They’re an unexpected pair but make more sense together than one might think. What eventually became labeled ‘Hypermodernism’ started out as ‘Neoromanticism.’ The leading figures of that movement were all interested in aggression and in pushing the limits of classical chess. More specifically, they wanted to figure out how to optimally apply force. Nimzowitsch did so through his doctrines of prophylaxis and overprotection, choosing a strong point to radiate force against while systematically denying an opponent similar ideas. Spielmann did so through the inherent imbalances of the sacrifice and the initiative, surrendering various advantages in order to apply enhanced force to a particular section of the board. And Nimzowitsch seemed to understand Spielmann better than most. If to Reuben Fine Spielmann was a simple soul whose "main concern in life, apart from chess, was to accumulate enough money to buy limitless quantities of beer" and to Max Euwe he was "very pleasant, rather a dreamer, although a little inclined to complain," Nimzowitsch saw him as, actually, "the hardest working of all the masters, continually searching out the flaws in his game and striving to eliminate them."
Spielmann's beer-guzzling, gambiteering ways may have seemed not exactly the image of a chess master, and another amusing aspect of him was his topsy-turvy results. This reached hilarious proportions in the 1920s where Spielmann could win an international tournament and then, in the very next tournament (and for no discernible reason), finish dead-last, but this inconsistency was obvious in the 1910s as well. In 1912, he led the super-elite San Sebastián tournament before abruptly collapsing at the halfway point. He also acquired a reputation as a giant killer, posting even scores against Tarrasch and Capablanca and being unusually effective against Rubinstein. This is the tip-off to Spielmann’s real strength as a player - that he was utterly fearless, loved being underestimated, and was able to force his famous opponents into what what Tal would call the “deep dark woods” where, regardless of the ‘objective evaluation,’ strong nerves and calculating ability tended to prevail.
Spielmann is associated above all with the sacrifice and wrote a classic book about it. Classicists believed that sacrifices were an atavistic notion and could work only if the opponent had already made a mistake. Spielmann was much closer to the conception of a player like Garry Kasparov in believing that sacrifices were essentially just another form of imbalance, with all kinds of dynamic considerations compensating for the lost material. "The faculty of converting energy into matter and matter into energy constitutes one of the most wonderful characteristics of chess and reveals, perhaps, the innermost secret of its fascination," he wrote of what he called "real sacrifices."
The art of the sacrifice brings Spielmann inevitably into the realm of dynamics and the initiative - although these terms were not in the lexicon of the period. But, more than other practitioners of the attack, Spielmann seemed to be satisfied reaching chaotic positions in which he had no idea who was better - in which, as he wrote, "the position's secrets reveal themselves only to a gifted and courageous player who has strong if controlled self-confidence." There may be a sort of higher chess truth in this - that logic will take you only so far; that, any game reaches a place of irrationality, and victory goes to whoever can keep his head in the maze of variations.
Spielmann was known for his gambit lines, but he tended to be somewhat judicious about the moment he sacrificed material - needing to have accelerated development in compensation. With white, he liked the Vienna Gambit, giving him an open f-file and the advanced pawn at e5. Tartakower inducted him into the "Order of the King's Gambit." Breyer had a theory that Spielmann’s entire conception of chess revolved around the KB5 square and it is true that he often orchestrated his play around an f-pawn battering ram or else occupying that square at an early moment.
Sources: There are several books on Spielmann that I'm not able to access. Edward Winter has a very helpful page on him here. Johannes Fischer has a good piece on him for chessbase here. His chess philosophy as well as his personality come through in The Art of Sacrifice in Chess.
