A Century of Chess

Book Announcement

Dear Friends,

I’m happy to announce the publication of a book on the cutting-edge, super-relevant topic of early 20th century chess history. It’s called A Century of Chess: 1900-1909.

I’ve been sort of pleased with myself, tbh, that I’ve written only a limited amount about chess here, but the truth is that chess takes up some absurd percentage of my brain space. For some time, I’ve had this neurotic, obsessional habit of working my way chronologically through chess history. For a while, it was just a way to pass the dead time during a day. Then it became a blog on chess.com. And now it’s a book, edited by FIDE Master Carsten Hansen and with game annotations by Grandmaster Cyrus Lakdawala. I’ll share a follow-up post when it’s actually published.

The book is meant for people who are already pretty serious about chess — so not for everyone, although I know that there are a number of chessheads here. The idea with A Century of Chess is to cover chess history in a way that (as far as I know) has never exactly been done before — player by player and tournament by tournament, so that the evolution of chess theory and the sort of artistic interplay between the leading players becomes clear.

There are a few points that I’ve been trying to get at in this enterprise:

1.Chess Is An Art

I remember one of my chess teachers, a real old school New York City hustler type, saying, very wistfully, that chess history should be taught in universities the same way that art or music is. That’s not a particularly popular view, but I thought he was basically right then and I still think so now. Chess is perfectly placed on the outer limits of the finite and is the perfect (I can’t imagine a better) blend of competition, creativity, logic, and fantasy. For anybody to get to the top of chess — to be a grandmaster beating other grandmasters — it’s necessary not just to master certain techniques but to reflect one’s personality in a game, the same way an artist would in a painting or a novel, and, not only that, but, at the highest levels, to have an approach to the game that’s truer, more profound, than the approach to the game of some other equally virtuosic grandmaster. That, to me, is the real heart of chess — the fact that two equally great players can have completely different, almost diametrically opposed approaches, so that when they do meet a fascinating conflict results, summoning up all the inner resources of both players but also presenting a sort of philosophical quarrel, in which, as Viccini puts it in The Princess Bride, we find out who is right and who is dead. 

2.Chess Evolves

That sense of the battle of ideas is particularly apparent in the period I’m covering in this volume — 1900 to 1909, the heart of the “classical era.” This was the period when the abiding principles of chess strategy were really laid down, and it’s a particularly precious era for chess players — the feeling is that the players weren’t just competing to see who was better but really were attempting to chart out the whole future course of the game’s development. By way of a sort of cast of characters, here are the main figures in this volume:

• Emanuel Lasker, cosmopolitan, itinerant, at one time the walking companion of Albert Einstein. The greatest chess player of the era, the toughest competitor, playing in a tenacious, dogfighting style that no one else could understand. The tragedy of his life that he wasn’t able to export his chess genius into the other fields that he avidly explored — mathematics, philosophy, physics, business. “In life, we are all duffers,” he said of the chess-playing community.

• Siegbert Tarrasch, Lasker’s great rival. Pompous, punctilious, utterly correct in all things. A successful doctor. The tragedy of his life more straightforward than Lasker’s: all three of his sons die within a short span of each other in the mid-1910s. A certain mercy that he dies in 1934 before the German Jewish bourgeoisie of which he was the embodiment is utterly destroyed.

• Harry Pillsbury, another tragic figure. Handsome, charming, the most popular chess figure of his era, pride of a particularly buoyant era in American history. Mastered chess as the hidden figure working the automaton Ajeeb. As a complete unknown, at age 22, won a major tournament and instantly became a leading world championship candidate. Such phenomenal powers of memory that he could, for instance, recite backwards a paragraph of technical writing after having glanced at it once. Died of syphilis at age 33.

• Akiba Rubinstein, the model of the chess obsessive. From an extremely poor Jewish Orthodox family in Poland. The story that he was one of the weaker players at the local club, then went away and studied with abandon. Returned months later to challenge the strongest player. The challenge was laughingly accepted; Rubinstein beat him and went on to become one of the strongest players in the world. A sense of immaculate architecture, chess truth in his play. The comment that Rubinstein’s play “is the endgame of a game that God started with himself a thousand years ago.” Went gradually mad over the next decades. Believed he was chased by a fly. In his old age, spent whole days making the first move of a chess game, contemplating it, then returning the piece to its home square.

• Géza Maróczy, the most dedicated chess student of his era. Considered a middle-tier master, he worked at chess with untiring energy — “his genius being in the taking of infinite pains,” as someone put it — and won a string of tournaments in the middle of the decade. Having fully earned the right to play for a world championship, he suddenly retired from chess on the eve of the match, likely (as I believe) because he was dedicating himself to some sort of underground Hungarian revolutionary politics.

• Carl Schlechter, the gentlest master of the era, the Chopin or Debussy of chess. Schlechter was known for his extreme shyness and his love for draws (it seemed to pain him to inflict defeat on someone else) even as he became a top-flight master in what is, after all, a highly-competitive bloodsport. Schlechter earned the right to a world championship match, was within one game of taking Lasker’s title, and then suddenly played with uncharacteristic pugnacity and lost. He would die of starvation in the immediate aftermath of World War I.

• Frank Marshall, the leading combinative player of the era. A devil-may-care American with a boyish streak, Marshall lost a clerking job when it was discovered that his studious attitude at work was owed to a pocket chess set he kept hidden in his desk — and, from there, he dedicated himself entirely to chess. He seemed to be taking the chess world by storm until he ran into the more sophisticated playing approach of Lasker and Tarrasch.

• David Janowski, patron saint of gamblers and degenerates. Scrupulously attired, lavishly funded by a notable art forger, Janowski turned into a raving maniac whenever he lost — and sometimes spent so much money in the casinos adjacent to international tournaments that his tournament winnings were reduced to a casino bailout and a train ticket home. A wonderfully creative and aggressive player who could somehow never bear to “cash in” and finish off the game when he had a winning position. Died in poverty.

3.Chess Is History

A great deal of the fun for me in indulging this obsession is the light it casts on 20th century history. The grandmasters weren’t political figures. They weren’t (with some exceptions) intellectuals. They were, by and large, regular people with a special talent, representatives of the greater European bourgeoisie, and all of the currents of their era passed through them. It was a uniquely optimistic period (in a way, actually, that may never again be repeated). There was an unalloyed belief in progress and an expectation of a future filled with intellectual and creative pursuits. The early part of the decade is unclouded — a cozy, international chess elite endlessly playing one another and litigating their well-established disputes (Marshall’s Romanticism versus Tarrasch’s classicism, etc). By the end of the decade, though, a different spirit appears: a “sturm und drang” era in which a a group of aggressive young masters started playing in an edgy, profound, and somehow more anxious style. By the next decade, some of these strains would coalesce into “hypermodernism” — the cubism of chess — but in the 1900s it was not quite that: just a turbulent feeling, a sense that, notwithstanding all the classical precepts, chess might have more depths hidden in it that anyone had really suspected.