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Almanac | |
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By Dan Schifrin |
Near Champions, Part One:
Siegbert Tarrasch
First in a series about great
players who never became world champion
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In
chess, as in most sports, not every first-class player earns a
world championship. Sometimes the difference between the
champion and the also-ran is a difference in raw abilities.
Often, however, the difference between two challengers has to
do with preparation, age, energy, and emotion. And on occasion
credible challengers to the world championship don’t make it
to the table because of politics, war, accidents, the need to
raise purse money, or professional obligations in another
field. |
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Dr Siegbert
Tarrasch |
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the first of the great chess players never to earn a world
championship was Dr. Siegbert Tarrasch (1862-1934), the man
everybody loves to hate. Tarrasch, a German-speaker like most
of the elite players of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries – including Wilhelm Steinitz, Adolph
Anderssen, Louis Paulsen, Emanuel Lasker and Carl Schlecter –
was considered arrogant and pompous on and off the board. His
one world championship match in 1908 with Lasker, who wore the
chess crown from 1894 to 1921, was fraught with tension.
Apparently the two men had only one conversation during the
entire match, which consisted of Tarrasch telling Lasker he
would beat him soundly. History records another outcome, with
Lasker winning with a score of 10.5 to 5.5. Like a number of
other great players who never became world champion, Tarrasch
was at an age disadvantage, since he was 46 and Lasker was 40.
Born in Breslau, Germany, Tarrasch spent most of his
life in Nuremberg, where he was a practicing physician. He
earned the German master title in 1883, and in 1888 in
Nuremberg he won the first in a row of several very strong
tournaments, including Breslau (1889), Manchester (1890),
Dresden (1892) and Leipzig (1894). By now he was playing as
well as, or better than, the world champion Steinitz, but his
duties as a doctor kept him from preparing for a world
championship match.
Tarrasch’s successes continued, and
by October of 1903 he challenged Lasker for the world
championship. The match was planned for the fall of 1904, but
arrangements fell through after Tarrasch’s request for a
postponement because of a skating accident was rejected. A few
years of inconsistent play followed, and in 1908 Lasker
finally consented to a world championship match with Tarrasch,
which Lasker decisively won.
Tarrasch was a technical
virtuoso, whose approach was to accurately deploy theoretical
ideas about center control and piece mobility. He once
described his method as “stalemating” style – referring to a
smothering strategy in which one’s opponent has literally
nowhere to go.
Like Steinitz, the first world champion
as well as the first systematic student of the game, Tarrasch
believed strongly in classical theory. In practice, that meant
controlling the center squares with pawns, with the assumption
that a strong, secure center would make it easier to move the
action from one side of the board to the other, as well as
keep one’s opponent from doing the same. In his capacity as
Germany’s chief chess pedagogue, Tarrasch wrote many books and
articles extolling this approach, and his ideas were dominant
in the chess world from 1900 until World War I. Many of his
books are classics, including “The Game of Chess,” an
international bestseller for many years.
Tarrasch’s
dogmatic insistence on his ideas, as well as the hubris with
which he discussed them, led Aaron Nimzowitsch, Richard Reti,
Saviely Tartakower and a few others chess grandmasters to
question basic assumptions about the center. These players
developed the Hypermodern approach, which flourished in the
1920s, and which has profoundly influenced chess style. In
contrast to Tarrasch, the hypermoderns believed that an
established, fixed center could be a liability, providing a
target for attack, and they proved that one could effectively
control the center from a distance, using pieces (mostly
knights and bishops) rather than pawns. A number of famous
hypermodern “opening systems” emerged during this time,
including the Nimzo-Indian Defense, the Queen’s Indian Defense
and the Grunfeld Defense.
Tarrasch was arguably the
best player in the world at the turn of the century, and would
likely have beaten Steinitz if he had the opportunity – and
perhaps Lasker as well – if Tarrasch had been in his prime.
The problem with a dominant player not winning the world
championship is that he becomes known for other things – in
the case of Tarrasch his dogmatic style, his unintentionally
spawning of the hypermoderns and his educational books on the
game.
One of Tarrasch’s best-known games, against
Nimzowitsch in St. Petersburg in 1914, is available in the
chess viewer – click on Tarrasch-Nimzowitsch on the right
panel. The key to Tarrasch’s win in this game is his offer to
sacrifice two bishops.
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See related articles:
Fischer vs. Spassky: World Chess Championship, 1972
(5/20/2000)
The Game is Adjourned… (4/28/2000)
A Brief History of the World Chess Championship: Middle
Game (5/20/2000)
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