How did the top players do it in the old days?

I have two questions on this theme:

1) How did the professional players study openings (and games in general) before the advent of computer databases, openings manuals etc.? How did they determine what the best move in any situation/opening was? Was it through trial-and-error, followed by a feat of memory?

2) We keep hearing that there was no substantial money in chess before Fischer's world title match. Even most modern GMs have to supplement their earnings from tournament winnings with other sources of income. I know Capablanca was subsidized by the Cuban government, but in general, how did the likes of Lasker, Alekhine, Tarrasch, Nimzowitsch, Flohr, Fine, Rubinstein, Marshall, Reti, Sämisch, Bogoljubov, Keres, Tartakower, Spielmann etc. get the money to travel around the world (when travel was time-consuming and very expensive) to places like St. Petersburg, New York, Amsterdam, London, Vienna, Prague, Stockholm, Moscow, Chicago, Barcelona, Bled, Bern, Paris, Leningrad, Havana, Buenos Aires and so on?

Anyone have any views?

Very interesting..

maybe they were wealthy men who had nothing else to do but study chess?

1. Word of mouth. Openings and ideas were passed on from other players. That, and they came up with their own stuff. That's why they were great.

2. The players used the prize from one tournament to fund the travel for the next. In general, they were all in serious poverty.

But you didnt get good money in chess in the olden days..

Bronstein, a great opening specialist and innovator, described his method. He would take 3 copies of each Informant and cut out what he deemed worth his time and filed each in a different way so he could access them by player, by opening....

I'd have to dig up wherever that article was (yes, one of dem olde fashioned paper magazines) to be sure of more detail, but you get the idea. I never knew of a more thorough attempt at databasing with paper.

Re how players got their money: Lasker was the Fischer of his time, or Fischer was the Lasker more properly, in that he demanded and got higher prizes and appearance fees. Some players, famously with Janowski, had wealthy patrons who believed in their man.

Others had professions they could rely on when chess wasn't enough, like Tartakover who was a lawyer. Reshevsky was an accountant.

Some made do with hustling, like Harrwitz, and then made do with an inheritance later on, also like Harrwitz.

A great many just left the competitive game altogether for a different profession like Morphy (even if he never practiced law later), Fine (Psychologist), Kashdan (Chess Magazine owner and editor and chess organizer), Herman Steiner (Hollywood Chess club owner and giver of lessons to the rich--but he never really left the game), and so on.

I think mostly they struggled along with a lot less money than they wished.

Some died impoverished. Schlechter is a sad case that comes to mind, as does de La Bourdonnais.

Yet some got quite rich apart from chess. I think Kolisch was just such a case. Denker came out quite well-to-do I believe with some early assistance from mega-rich Maurice Wertheim's knowledge of stocks ("Who told you to buy this garbage" he asked when Denker first showed him his stock portfolio.)

Yes, to quote one great playerof yesteryear, "I have the fame, now I must get the money."

Thanks for your input, Nytik and goldendog (you guys almost without exception write interesting stuff).

concerning 1) - but presumably it was not in the players' interests to tell their opponents or potential future opponents what worked for them and did not?

And how did they decide what worked? Purely if they won the game in question? Is an opening that does not lead to a win not sound?

Presumably they would have had to have played at least several games with one line/variation/novelty before they could decide whether it was useful or not. If their choice turned out not to have been sound, doesn't that mean quite a few lost (or at least drawn) games? If even the top players were experimenting to some extent, how can we account for their unparalled success?

Now that modern players can use a database to instantly see what works best and what doesn't, shouldn't we expect these players to have higher winning percentages than the old masters?

concerning 2) - thanks, I often wondered how the old masters afforded their travel to tournaments etc. when even modern GMs struggle to meet their costs.

Now that modern players can use a database to instantly see what works best and what doesn't, shouldn't we expect these players to have higher winning percentages than the old masters?

No becuase all the players have the same advantage.

Firstly, almost without exception? You'd better be talking to goldendog. 

Now, to question one. They weren't necessarily telling their future opponents, rather they were discussing it with all other players. Chess is a surprisingly social game.

And yes, they decided things worked because they won games. That's why so many completely unsound gambits and whatnot prevailed in days of yore. People had to fight hard to stop the onslaughts, and so the openings were felt to be OK. Of course, had the defending players got such a vast amount of theory as we have today, no-one would dare such gambits.

Finally, you seem to be assuming that they would only try things out in tournament games. Everyone in those days (and I do mean everyone) played Coffee-House Games (as they are known) and that would have been sufficient to prove their worth. It's not like they were playing for much even in the important matches, anyway.

Would you agree that using databases to keep to only the lines that have the highest success rates has made chess less experimental, and more rigid - formulaic and predictable even?

Speaking to this item only:

1) How did the professional players study openings (and games in general) before the advent of computer databases, openings manuals etc.? How did they determine what the best move in any situation/opening was? Was it through trial-and-error, followed by a feat of memory?

First... all high level chess players use databases now don't misunderstand my response, databases have changed the game... but... 

 In a 4 million game database how many of those games are really critical, how many are actually relevant to a cutting edge elite master line in play today? Far far fewer... the masters of old were good at keeping current with the lines that were in fashion, and they knew their 'stem' games. They knew the games that everyone referred to as being decisive and consequential in line X or variation Y.

The memory required remains phenomenal, but great memory has always been a prerequisite for a GM. The brain of a GM, at least as far as chess as is concerned, has some talents way out on the skinny part of the bell curve, right hand side.

I think that players at the level of, say, GM don't rely on the spat out win-percentage of any line. They rely instead on hard analysis for their lines of choice. Due to the greater theory that is known to everyone, the creative moment and the fight gets pushed back further and further. I'd say that is the effect of our databases. The burden to commit to memory all that stuff just gets heavier each year.

I asked Nakamura maybe 2 years ago on ICC how long he was going to be in chess before he gave it up. He said until age 40 and then the game was going to be "dead." So he said!