A Century of Chess: Aron Nimzowitsch (from 1910-19)

Aron Nimzowitsch was born in 1886. in Riga. His father was a strong amateur player and he rose quickly to a high level. At Ostend-B 1907, he was the kid, 20 years old and needing other players to vouch for him to gain admittance to the casino where the tournament was held. Nimzowitsch’s results during this period were good but not exactly superlative. At Barmen 1905 Meisterturnier B, his debut, he finished third-from-last. By 1907, he had broken through to the next level, taking shared third at Ostend-B and shared fourth at Karlsbad, but was still a step back from winning international tournaments. He had a significant achievement in 1912, sharing the lead with Akiba Rubinstein at San Sebastián and losing to him in a famous last-round game featuring a double blunder. (Nimzowitsch blamed nervousness.) In 1914, he finished shared first at an epic Russian championship, earning one of two qualifying spots to St Petersburg, but there, again, he found himself just short of the very best, failing to qualify for the finals. 

That’s where the outbreak of World War I found Nimzowitsch — very, very good, but unable to cross a critical threshold and join the absolute elite. To Nimzowitsch’s great credit, he did eventually get there. In the 1920s, he won international tournaments at Copenhagen, Marienbad, Dresden, Hanover, and Karlsbad and was, for an extended period, the world’s #3. And, in the process of overcoming those final hurdles, Nimzowitsch changed chess forever. He came to the conclusion that his path to the top would rest on devising a new philosophical system for playing a chess game — which he laid out in his famous books, My System, Chess Praxis, and The Blockade. There’s lots of room to make fun of, and to question, Nimzowitsch’s approach — there’s a very funny lecture where, for instance, Yasser Seirawan just tears it apart; Hans Kmoch has a pretty hilarious parody — but its significance is hard to overstate. Nimzowitsch seemed to come up with a bible for defensive, ‘prophylactic’ play, and to counteract the principles of attack and spatial advance that united chess theory from Morphy to Tarrasch. Tigran Petrosian, for instance, said that he kept a copy of Chess Praxis under his pillow and called it something more than a chess book — "a bedtime story for a chess child." 

In understanding Nimzowitsch, I keep thinking about Chad Bradford, a middle reliever who features prominently in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. Bradford is a middling but not great minor league pitcher and, realizing that he may not make it, makes his style stranger and stranger. He begins pitching from a three-quarters angle and then sidearm and, finally, throws virtually underhanded. “Some invisible force had willed his arm earthward,” Lewis writes. 

Similarly, Nimzowitsch seems to have taken the punishing result at his 1905 début particularly hard. Instead of concluding that he was 18 years old and in his first bout with veteran masters, Nimzowitsch apparently decided that aggressive play was the problem. By 1907, he is recognizably different, creating bizarrely crabbed formations out of the opening, gradually stifling his opponent’s counterplay, and then running over the opponent’s position. His game against Shoosmith in 1907 is a good example of Nimzowitsch’s maturing style. By the 1910s, he was experimenting with a variety of ‘inferior’ openings - the Philidor, the French Advance Variation, etc, and getting good results but also raising eyebrows amongst other players. 

The rivalry with Tarrasch seems to have started from a 1904 game when Tarrasch declared in front of a large number of spectators, "Never in my life have I had such a won game after ten moves as I have now." Nimzowitsch never forgot the insult. In 1911, a war of words broke out between them. Tarrasch wrote that Nimzowitsch "has a preference for strange, bizarre, even hideous moves in the opening from which he has been lucky from time to time.” Nimzowitsch portrayed himself as a champion of freedom stifled by the dogmas of the old regime. "Ridicule can do much, embitter the lives of young talents for instance," he wrote, "but one thing it cannot do is to put a permanent halt to the breakthrough of new and powerful ideas!" 

It’s a little difficult to tell how seriously Nimzowitsch took his own decrees at this stage of his career. He was very far from having worked a coherent ‘hypermodern’ philosophy and his declarations that he had done so often seemed like an extension of his personal eccentricity — for which he was forever getting into fights with other players. A controversy was created by an automatic scoring device that he devised, and created a ruckus with, at Karlsbad 1911. His condescending attitude during a game with Walter John at Hamburg 1910 — during which Nimzowitsch conspicuously read a newspaper and assiduously studied the artwork on the walls of the playing venue — led to John’s challenging him to a duel. Nimzowitsch must have set a personal record among grandmasters by being challenged twice to duels — the second time by the generally peaceful Géza Maróczy, who, claimed Hans Kmoch, "likely wouldn't have known which end of the pistol to use." 

But, again, Nimzowitsch was not someone to underestimate. If, in 1911, he was talking a very big game, by the outbreak of the war a number of other players seemed to be obtaining good results by adopting something of his crabbed style. And, in the 1920s, he really did achieve a breakthrough, articulating a coherent defensive-minded philosophy and playing at a genuinely world-class level. The consensus of the chess world has been that Nimzowitsch was the pioneer and Tarrasch — and really classical chess in general — basically dogmatic and narrow-minded. As Nimzowitsch put it with his usual gift for exaggeration, "After the war, the correctness of my revolutionary chess views was recognized universally. The seemingly strange and bizarre variants have gradually earned their rightful place. On the other hand, Tarrasch's theory (about arithmetic center, quick development, etc) now only brings smiles on people's faces."

Nimzowitsch's Style:

I’ve been trying to look over Nimzowitsch’s games in the 1910s with fresh eyes and not applying to them the terminology of his ‘system’ — and they are a bit different from how Nimzowitsch would tend to describe them. For one thing, he was — at least at this stage — more of an attacking player than he is usually given credit for. It is possible to see overprotection in Nimzowitsch’s games — of the d5 point in the game against John — but most interesting are his games that seem to operate by some other logic. In this 1910 game against Leonhardt, he evaluates the position from some different criteria than Leonhardt does — finding that his scattered pieces are, in concrete lines, better harmonized the white’s. 

In this 1912 game against Spielmann, he is able to demonstrate that a pawn mass in the center isn’t necessarily such a great advantage — with Nimzowitsch’s pieces dancing around the black center and able, with impressive economy, to generate an attack. 

Nimzowitsch in the Opening:

To contemporaries, Nimzowitsch seemed mostly to be interested in the bizarre in the opening. His experiments ran in the direction of the Philidor, the Caro-Kann, the Old Indian, and the French Advance Variation — which he made a theoretical jumping-off point for his discussion of the center in My System. 

Nimzowitsch wrote that, in 1913, he discovered the idea of the Nimzo-Indian — ...Bb4 without ...d5 — and this, as he immodestly put it, "completely destroyed Tarrasch's position as a universally recognized chess wisdom teacher." 

Sources: There are very many sources on Nimzowitsch. The best is Per Skjoldager and Jorn Erik Nielsen's Aron Nimzowitsch: On The Road To Chess Mastery. Spektrowski posts a fascinating series of articles called 'How I Became A Grandmaster.'