Lasker's 27 year reign

Lasker fans point to his 27 year reign as world champion as proof of his greatness. Now, consider his world championship matches : 

1894   Steinitz

1896   Steinitz

1907   Marshall

1908   Tarrasch

1910   Schlecter

1910   Janowski

1921   Capablanca 

As we can see he didnt defend his title from 1896-1907 and again from 1910-1921 !  This is a period of 20 years ! Isnt his lengthy reign rather artificial if he doesnt play for 20 years of it ?  

He also played players who had no chance against him, like Janowski and Marshall and avoided playing Tarrasch until Tarrasch was almost 50 and past his prime. 

I think that Rubinstein was scheduled to play a title match with him but this was cancelled when WW I broke out.

The Schlecter match may not have been a title match.

Yeah, he was very good, but not 27 years good. He was more concerned with protecting his title than defending it, it seems.

It was Tarrasch, as I recall, that had put off any matches with Lasker until Tarrasch was pretty old.

Lasker was not afraid of anyone to my knowledge. Apart from a point of honor that separated Capablanca and him in earlier match negotiations, if the money was there Lasker wanted to play.

Remember, Lasker was the Fischer of his time in demanding higher recompense for himself and chessplayers in general.

I understand this, and agree. However, a reign of 27 years in which you dont defend the title for 20 of those 27 seems very artificial, even questionable. If FIDE had existed during his time they would have stripped him of his title for not playing whoever the #2 player was at any given period. There was a period during Lasker's reign in which he should have played Tarrasch but didnt. The same applies to Rubenstein. It was the responsibility of the challenger to raise the money and if they couldnt then there was no match. Yet , he played much weaker players because they did raise the money : Janowski and Marshall for example. If you subtract the 20 years he didnt play he is left with a reign of 7 years..... not nearly so impressive, is it ? 

The only player who was superior to Lasker during his reign was likely Capablanca, so with or without title matches he was the #1 player in the world for a long time.

20 years or so as best sounds pretty good to me.

The main downside to me, as a fan, are the unplayed games and matches as well as Lasker's inactive periods.

Agreed that pointing to his 27 year reign as proof of his greatness is misleading/meaningless. If Kasparov had been able to choose his opponents he would probably still be champion and be about to eclipse Lasker's mark. I regard the fact that he changed the way the game was played as the true measure of his greatness.

As for not playing Tarrasch until he was in his 50s, certainly Tarrasch was stronger earlier in life but there is a certain degree of come-uppance for his refusal to play Lasker in the 1890s.

I dont know why Tarrasch would refuse to play Lasker in the 1890s ?  I know there was bad blood between them but I dont know what the problem was between them ? I think Tarrasch was 48 when they played their match in 1908. 

 This is where we need batgirl! I think Lasker challenged Tarrasch to a match and Tarrasch brushed him off, telling him to go and win some international tournaments to prove his mettle.

As a side note, for all his arrogance etc, I feel rather sorry for Tarrasch.

Kasparov actually did choose his opponent once.  Shirov qualified to play him but then Kasparov rejected him in favor of Kramnik.  Not really relevant though since he ended up losing to his opponent of choice.

While we are talking about long reigns being artificial, surely Botvinnik's was aswell ? He managed to keep the title for so long because of 1) retaining the title in the event of a tie (against Bronstein and Smyslov) and 2) the right to rematch in the event of a loss (against Smyslov and Tal)

Tarrasch figured that Lasker was below him, as NickYoung5 says, Lasker is not to blame for the delay in this match, rather Tarrasch ego is.

 I didn't know that! How did that come to be?

Tarrasch was called the tournament champion of the world. It was probably true and Tarrasch thought that was more important than Match champion. Too bad for Tarrasch.

I never did understand how players were classified as strong tournament players but mediocre  match players. Chess is chess is it not. If you play well in tournaments why shouldn't you play well in a match?

You dont see that too much in modern chess. I cant think of anybody, off hand, who is strong in tournament play and weak in matches.

Fezzik, ouch! However, I still don't understand how Kasparov got to make this decision. Wasn't FIDE a party to this ... or was this in the days of the FIDE and non-FIDE titles?

I think that Kramnik is thought to be somewhat stronger in matches than in tournaments, whereas with Topalov it's the other way around.

I understand the point about not defending the title during 20 of those 27 years.  However, look at it this way:

When fischer was champion the "cycle" was to have a championship match every three years.   So, that means that in a 30 year reign, 2/3rds of those years wouldn't have champion ship matches.  I'm not math wiz, but I think that means that there would be 20 years of no championship matches under those conditions.   Right?  

I think the greater problems for Lasker, and I'm picking this up mainly from Soltis' book "why lasker matters", were two fold.  First, he had touble finding people who could stake the matches.  And, 2 he really needed to make a living and spent a great deal of time doing other things to earn the ducats.

I thought that Bronstein was afraid to win the title because of perceived threats against his family.

Maybe, but I don't think that is proven. 

Botvinnik did have the government's support behind him though, being an ethnic Russian and a Communist.

I hope I'm not redundant but all you have to do is look at the record. Lasker beat and aging Steinitz. He beat a poor match player in Marshall. Marshall almost lost the US championship to another Lasker---Edward Lasker. Marshall was not a good match player.

Lasker beat an aging Tarrasch. He then drew with Schlechter. That was supposed to be a slam dunk. They couldn't get enough interest in that match to finance more than 10 games. Lasker then beat another poor match player---Janowsky.

He then played Capablanca and lost the title. Not a sterling record.