The Lasker Enigma. Blunders and Genius Combined.
Afternoon everyone.
Although I post about chess from the past, I keep a close eye on what is going on in the chess world, and follow current chess tournaments as they unfold online. The only thing that I have in common with Alekhine is that any game, played anywhere, by anyone, is worth spending time on.
A few days ago I followed a fascinating game with a pretty finish. This one.
This King march to g6 with a mating attack reminded me of an old game of Lasker's, which taught me a lot about that extraordinary player.
In many ways Lasker was an enigma. Sometimes, when looking at his games, you ask yourself a question How could someone who made so many mistakes - or outright blunders - have been one of the greatest players who has ever lived? Or, to go another way, how could such a magnificent player have made so many horrible mistakes?
Well, you have to take into account the fact that he was not a professional player for most of his career - another amateur World Champion - Max Euwe - was well aware of his own capacity for blunders. Also, from quite early in his career, he was not physically robust, and I think some of his errors were due to physical factors.
He could make horrible mistakes and also play really magnificent chess, not only in the same tournament, but in the same game!! In two tournaments - Nuremburg 1896 and New York 1924 - he excelled himself in that regard, mixing outright blunders with really magnificent chess. And he won both tournaments - against World Class fields - by a distance! Lasker really was unique.
So I decided to share the game in question - I have never seen it properly annotated -Tarrasch was a wonderful annotator, but his notes in the tournament book contain a number of errors - so I have spent a few hours trying to look at it as best I can ( I suspect the engines will come up with improvements on my analysis, but I prefer to study games for myself, and to try to understand the players solving problems at the board) Hopefully you will enjoy the game, and, as I did, learn something about Lasker the chess player.
It was played at the great Nuremburg Tournament of 1896.
Lasker is far left, in a hat. His opponent was a fine player in his own right - friend and student of the great Mikhail Tchigorin. A nice picture of him from todayspeople.ru.
Enjoy the game! A fascinating one from start to finish.
To close with, a nice picture of chess in the the Cafe Dominick is St. Petersburg where Schiffers and Tchigorin learned their chess. Not especially relevant, but a nice picture that I found on facebook.
