Géza Maróczy: The Forgotten Genius (Part One)

Géza Maróczy was born on March the 3rd, in Szeged, Hungary. He grew up to be one of the greatest chess players of his era, and left behind a legacy that will not be forgotten for a long, long time.

His first international (read 'important') tournament (or the earliest one I could gather info on) was Nuremberg 1896. It was a round-robin tournament (Round Robin = everybody plays everybody) and Maróczy finished in 2nd behind none other than Emanuel Lasker himself. His only loss was an awful game against Steinitz in Round 4. 

Going slightly off-topic, Nuremberg 1896 also included a Consultation Game (i.e. two players vs two players) between Blackburne + Pilsbury and Schiffers + Steinitz. Here is the link to the game if you're interested.

Anyways, here are some of his best moves from the tournament:

The next tournament we're going to cover is London 1899. But before that, we're going to have a look at two great games Geza Maroczy played between 1896 and 1899. The first is a correspondence game against Karoly Zambelly. Zambelly and Maroczy played lots of correspondence, and as you can probably guess, Maroczy usually got the better of him. The last game, Zambelly got mated on e5 and wasn't very happy about it, saying that he'd never get mated on the square again. Unfortunately for poor Zambelly, that didn't age very well.

The next one is also played in 1897, against Rudolf Charousek (who was a brilliant player in his own right). It was played in Nagytétény Quadrangular, a small tournament between (as the name suggests) four players. Charousek finished half a point above Maroczy. The other players were Győző Exner and Kornél Havasi.

Now to get back on track: In London 1899, Maroczy finished second on 18 points, tied with Pilsbury and Janowski. Emanuel Lasker won the tournament (again!) by a whopping 4.5 points. There were many mistakes in the written stuff of the tournament, especially after Teichmann withdrew and caused some confusion with the pairing.

Here are Maroczy's best moves from the 27-round tournament.

The last tournament we're going to cover here is Paris 1900, in which Geza Maroczy finished joint third with Frank Marshall (who was making his international tournament debut!), half a point behind Pilsbury and two and a half behind Lasker (who won all three of the tournaments in the blog post!). Interestingly, there were several players who put in an atrociously bad performance, and were perhaps just there to offer the stronger players free points.

Lucien Didier, Manuel Marquez Sterling and James Mortimer got a combined total of 4 points from the entire tournament. Didier beat Sterling, Sterling beat Mortimer, and Mortimer beat Didier. These games were the players' only tournament wins, with only Mortimer who managed to scrape two draws against Mason and Mieses.

Paris 1900 was the last of the World's Fair tournaments. It was a 16-round tournament, and had a curious system with draws: when two players draw a game, they had to switch colors and replay the game and the result of the replay was what would count. The only possible way to draw a game was if two players drew twice in a row, so draws were rather scarce in Paris 1900 (only 14 games out of 164 ended in a draw).

The winner (Lasker) won 5000 francs, which is equivalent to about $25,000 today. Pilsbury got 2500, Maroczy and Marshall got 1750, Burn got 1500, Tchigorin 1000 and Marco and Mieses 300 each. The top four also got Sèvres vases, which was the tradition of all three Paris World's Fair chess tournaments.

So without further ado, let's get into Maroczy's Paris 1900 performance.

So there you go, Part One of my series on Geza Maroczy. I hope you enjoyed my post; have a great day everyone!