A Century of Chess: Bradley Beach 1929
One of the quirks of learning chess history is that it makes you pull out the atlas and learn these really obscure US towns. Cambridge Springs is a railroad town in western Pennsylvania that for a short time boasted a world-class hotel. Lake Hopatcong is a small town in western New Jersey that had a brief fluorescence as a resort destination. Lone Pine is in California, near Death Valley, and has been a popular site for shooting Westerns. And Bradley Beach — site of a middle-tier tournament in 1929 — is a resort town on the Jersey Shore.
Alexander Alekhine, after winning the world championship, took a well-deserved rest from chess. It may have been during this time that he received his doctorate in law — at least he started calling himself 'doctor,' although there's apparently no actual evidence of the degree. Bradley Beach was his return to competitive play, and if, by his standards, he was a little off-form — he was outplayed in the early part of the game in the first four rounds and had to fight for the win — he nonetheless took clear first with 8.5/9, starting a terrifying tournament run. Including Bradley Beach, he would take clear or shared first in his next ten tournaments — a streak that wouldn't be broken until 1934.
The tournament spotlighted Alekhine’s endgame ability, a less-noticed but vital part of his game. Unlike Capablanca, who seemed to simplify always to the essential, Alekhine’s endgame ability was about finding activity and complexity even with reduced material on the board.
The chess-playing Steiners have left little impression on chess history — they were a step shy of the true world elite — but they were really good! The drama of the tournament came from Alekhine’s tough games with them in the penultimate and final rounds. Both were born in Hungary and immigrated to the English-speaking world — Herman Steiner settling in California and Lajos Steiner, eventually, in Australia. Lajos had a particularly good streak in the late '20s, finishing shared second at the very strong Kecskemet tournament and giving Alekhine a run for his money here.
Steiner had a dry, positional style and was easy to miss in a tournament, but he entered his last-round game with Alekhine undefeated and trailing by a half-point. Needing a win, Steiner allowed a bishop to be caught offsides. It took Alekhine 12 moves to finally trap the bishop, but once he did it secured the game and the tournament.
Sources: MVP_chess has an astonishingly detailed writeup of the tournament here. Alekhine annotates the Herman Steiner game in My Best Games of Chess.
