A Century of Chess: Stockholm 1912
In 1909, Alexander Alekhine, at age 16, won the amateur chess championship of Russia, securing for himself the title of master. In 1910 he finished a very respectable shared seventh at Hamburg, alongside Tarrasch. In 1911 he finished shared eighth, again a highly respectable showing, at the international Karlsbad tournament. Those placements led to an invitation, along with four other foreign masters, to the Nordic Congress in Stockholm in 1912. There, Alekhine, aged 19, won the first international tournament of his career with an overpowering score of +8-1=1, a point-and-a-half ahead of Cohn.
His style - and the ‘grand conceptions’ that he would be famous for - are already evident at this point of his career. Take the cunning move 20….e3! in his game with Spielmann, which consolidates black’s advantage; or the gorgeous 21….Be6!! in the game with Nyholm; or, in his best game of the tournament, his sacrifice 9.f5! against Olland, which leads to a long-running initiative that he retains all the way through to the winning endgame.
Ironically, though, the most Alekhine-esque combination of the tournament was delivered by the otherwise unknown Fridlizius in his game with Alekhine.
Cohn, Spielmann, Olland, and Marco (lured out of retirement) were the other foreign masters invited to Stockholm, and not so surprisingly the five of them took all the leading places. Unexpectedly, Spielmann, who was having a banner year, finished at the back of that pack with an equal score. The tournament is, I suppose, an opportunity to appreciate the play of Erich Cohn, who finished a strong second here. He was an uneven player and a bit unconvincing as an international master but had a strong combinatorial vision.
More than anything else, Stockholm 1912 may represent an opportunity lost. The tournament was contemporaneous with the Olympic Games, also held in Stockholm. Could the tournament have been discreetly folded into the Olympics, which then would have changed chess history forever - making chess unequivocally a sport and freeing chessplayers henceforth from the stigma of nerdiness? Maybe. Hooper and Whyld say that "attempts were made at Stockholm 1912 to link chess with the Olympics," but I have no idea how strenuous those attempts were or if the Olympians paid any attention to the chess tournament at all (there's no sign of it, incidentally, in the books on the 1912 Olympics available online). In any case, chess as an Olympic sport would have been no less ridiculous than lawn tennis, tug-of-war or equestrian dressage, which were all events at the 1912 Olympics.
(And that's to say nothing of the 'Art Competition,' which was part of the Olympics at the time and was dropped not too long afterwards; the initial winner of the Olympic Literature prize, by the way, was the Olympics' founder Baron de Coubertin who won the gold medal in 1912 with his 'Ode To Sport' including the stirring lines "O Sport, you are Beauty!...O Sport, you are Justice!...O Sport, you are Fecundity!")
Sources: There's not so much out there about the Stockholm 1912 tournament. Alekhine annotates a few of his games in My Best Games of Chess. There was a contemporary German-language tournament book. The tournament is discussed in chess publications of the time such as The British Chess Magazine and The Chess Amateur. simaginfan has a really excellent write-up on Joel Fridlizius and on the Alekhine game here - together with a wonderful Alekhine photograph.
