A Century of Chess: Ujpest 1934

Andor Lilienthal made his claim to be one of the best in the world with a convincing victory here, scoring +7 to win by a half-point in a fast field. He had impressed by coming shared second with Alekhine at Hastings earlier that year and done well in Olympiads, but now, at 23 years old, he seemed to vault to the next level. Unfortunately, it was a degree of success that he couldn't quite sustain. He would go on to win a Soviet championship and to qualify for a Candidates' Tournament but wouldn't be quite the world-beater he seemed at this moment in the '30s when he defeated Capablanca and vexed Alekhine and could tear through a strong tournament with visionary, combinative chess. Central to Lilienthal's success was his ability to win with the French Defense, which he treated like a coiled spring and attacking weapon, taking four points with it in this tournament. 

You kind of have to blink twice at the results here. The crosstable, at first sight, looks inverted — with Tartakower and Vidmar finishing with negative scores and with Vasja Pirc and the little-known Paulino Frydman well ahead of them. Pirc, who was for some time Yugoslavia's strongest player, is one of these very attractive masters in chess history — like Swiderski or Gurgenidze — who seem to just be intoxicated by originality and can’t help but go their own way. It’s fitting that — even though most chess players likely couldn’t come up with a single sporting achievement of his — one of the handful of major opening systems has his name. 

Salo Flohr's ten draws here are a bit deceptive — he had to leave early — but this was an early indication of the docile avuncular approach which would characterize his place in the chess world for the next 20 years. 

I'm not so impressed with the Polish player Paulino Frydman, who got lucky in a few games in one of the best results of his career, but as a player he was the kind of knife fighter who could be dangerous against anybody. Here he snatches a pawn from Tartakower and hangs on to it.