Emanuel Lasker's Letter to Chess.

Morning everyone!

Well, this is going to be a strange little post!

A fascinating article  by my young friend Toucanchess, 

https://www.chess.com/blog/toucanchess/chess-the-art-of-war 

elicited a comment from me about Lasker's approach to certain things in chess, and I decided to put together a couple of posts. I've read an awful lot of chess books, and without doubt there  has been more utter tripe written about Lasker than any other player!! So, my intention is to explore a few of the myths, and refute some of the - admittedly easily refutable - nonsense that has been written.

One part of my research involved scouring the modern internet thing for an online version of Lasker's letter to 'Chess' magazine from 1936, to save me  the trouble of transcribing it with my one finger keyboard skills. Amazingly, although I found a part of it on Winter's 'chesshistory' site, I couldn't find the full version. This little post is to fill in that particular gap.

Many years ago now, my good friend Barry Wood,

who founded and published the magazine out of a small building at the back of Sutton Coldfield railway station, sent me a copy of the relevant page. It was made on the kind of copying machines that we had at the time, and quite possibly involved him walking down the road to get it done - the machines were hugely expensive back then, and most towns had a shop where you could take stuff to be copied. It is a fascinating letter - well, I personally find anything that Lasker wrote interesting; he was an extraordinary man.

So here it is.

 Lasker refers to a number of things written about him. Having a number of them to hand, I will add them here so that you can see what he was writing about. Firstly what Reti - quite possibly influenced by his own game with Lasker from Mahrisch-Ostrau in 1923 - 

had to say in 'Masters of the Chessboard'.

The header picture is of the New York 1924 Tournament Reti talks about, and has Lasker sitting front right, with Reti standing 2nd from the right.

The items from 'Dr Lasker's Chess Career' referred to. They were originally in Wiener Schachzeitung, Januray 1929 - an issue devoted to Lasker that can be found online, I think - except for the one by Kmoch, which is from 'Die Kunst der Verteidigung'.

As I was putting this together, the indefatigable Kamalakanta started a series of his own on Lasker's games:- https://www.chess.com/blog/kamalakanta/emanuel-lasker-chess-giant-part-i-a-collection-of-annotated-games  so there will be plenty of stuff about lasker to be going on with over the next couple off weeks! 

Thanks for reading. I know chess history isn't everyone's thing.