A Century of Chess: Karlsbad 1929
Dear Friends,
I have a post up on the chess.com home page about the book of A Century of Chess (Volume 1).
- Sam
Aron Nimzowitsch made his début at Barmen 1905 as a gifted 19-year-old — and finished in third-to-last-place. He made a claim for himself as a first-rank master in a series of tournaments in the later part of the decade, and finally broke through to the world’s elite by challenging for the lead at the very strong San Sebastián 1912 tournament and by qualifying for St Petersburg 1914. But in his first tournament after the war, at Gothenburg 1920, Nimzowitsch once again finished third-from-last. Clearly struggling financially, he took part in relatively few tournaments in the early part of the 1920s, usually finishing somewhere in the middle of the crosstable. But then something happened. He was shared first at Marienbad 1925, first at Dresden 1926 ahead of Alekhine and Rubinstein, close second at Kecskemet 1927, third at New York 1927, shared first at London 1927 — and, somewhat to its surprise, the chess world found itself forced to acknowledge Nimzowitsch as a leading world championship contender (a view that Nimzowitsch vigorously endorsed).
Even today, there’s a tendency to think of Nimzowitsch primarily as a theoretician — to chess as Charley Lau is to baseball or Niccolò Machiavelli to politics, the crown prince of kibitzers. But he was also very, very good, and at a large, high-quality tournament at Karlsbad, he hit the apogee of his career, scoring +9, finishing ahead of Capablanca and 21 players, and doing so in his cutting-edge, frequently bizarre style, which his opponents could barely even understand. He thoroughly confused aces like Bogoljubow, Vidmar, and Tartakower — winning games that sometimes looked like practical jokes — and defeated weaker players, like Gilg, in games where he seemed to just shuffle pieces around the back ranks of his position but nonetheless produced far-sighted, irresistible strategic plans. Nimzowitsch credited his victory with adopting a new system of physical exercise and giving himself fresh confidence. He sat down for the late rounds with the thought, "I believe in the validity of my chess ideas and I believe that I am capable of demonstrating their correctness."
The tournament turned on a quality not normally associated with Nimzowitsch — competitive ferocity. He had a very slow start but gradually made up ground and won the tournament with a final spurt where he scored 3.5/4 against Vidmar, Spielmann, Maróczy, and Tartakower. He entered the last round leading Capablanca by a half-point and tied with Spielmann. Capablanca crushed Maróczy. Spielmann, who sometimes struggled with nerves, got only a draw out of a winning position against the tailender Mattison. Nimzowitsch, with the toughest pairing of the three, reached a strange, blocked position against Tartakower, but — as Capablanca remarked to a bystander — "One man knows what he is up to in playing that crazy sort of stuff, and the other man does not." Alekhine, attending the tournament as a correspondent, thought that Nimzowitsch engaged in a bit of gamesmanship — recognizing that Tartakower fatigued easily and launching the decisive attack in the sixth hour of play.
Alekhine was very snippy in his notes for the tournament, claiming that Capablanca was barely even trying against the stronger players and was playing by “swallowing all the smaller fish” with his superior technique. Alekhine made much of a catastrophic blunder committed by Capablanca in his game against Samisch, although it seems that domestic issues may have been more to blame than a fall-off in Capablanca’s chess strength. The story is that Capablanca’s wife showed up unexpectedly in Karlsbad, which was a less-than-pleasant surprise, since Capablanca was in the middle of an affair. And, somewhere in the midst of calculating all the possibilities for what this meant for his marriage and peace of mind, he hung a knight straight out of the opening.
Spielmann and Nimzowitsch wouldn’t seem to have had all that much in common, but they came up together, were a pair in some of their best tournaments (at San Sebastián 1912 as here), and made something of an effective team — with Spielmann defeating Capablanca in round 20 and Nimzowitsch overtaking him at the same time. Nimzowitsch also took credit for Spielmann’s success in this tournament, claiming that Spielmann “is finally starting to understand my theories.” Spielmann was always an unbelievably streaky player. He started the tournament with nine points out of ten, fell back in the middle rounds, but rallied with the late win over Capablanca to take shared second.
The tournament’s principal significance in chess history was as the debut of Vera Menchik — the first woman to play in a genuinely elite international tournament. Menchik, born in Moscow, studied with Géza Maróczy from 1923, who called her “every inch a master.” Menchik’s arrival in international chess coincided with Albert Becker’s brush with chess history as the contestant who regressively argued that Menchik shouldn’t be permitted to play. Let’s be fair to Becker — Menchik wasn’t really in the same class as the contestants at Carlsbad and finished dead last; while Becker had the result of his career to come in shared fourth — but it’s the fate of all sourpusses to eat their words, and just like in every good story (like Tarrasch with Yates at Hamburg 1910, like Bernstein with Capablanca at San Sebastián 1911), Becker was the first player to be beaten by a girl in a major tournament, giving Menchik one of her two wins.
Sources: Nimzowitsch wrote a book on the tournament, Carlsbad 1929. The tournament is discussed from Nimzowitsch's perspective in Rudolf Reinhardt's Aron Nimzowitsch. Edward Winter has a page on Alekhine's articles about the tournament.
