A Century of Chess: Marienbad 1925
Marienbad had the misfortune of being held too close to Baden-Baden. Some of the stronger players were evidently too exhausted to take part, and Marienbad had the ragged feel of an after-party.
It is important in chess history, though, as the moment when Aron Nimzowitsch regained his rightful place among the first rank of international masters. Nimzowitsch had been very nearly a world championship contender before World War I, coming within a game of winning the elite San Sebastián 1912 tournament and qualifying for St Petersburg 1914. The early 1920s were, from a competitive and financial point of view, a difficult period for him. He finished twelfth at Gothenburg 1920, shared sixth at Carlsbad 1923 and ninth at Baden-Baden. He was clearly struggling enormously with money and had to miss several of the marquee international offerings. But Nimowitsch, as would become apparent, was working very hard on chess and defining his distinctive approach to play, which was hypermodernism brought to its most theoretically pure extreme. That new approach was on display at the minor Copenhagen tournament of 1923, which Nimzowitsch won by two full points, and then laid out in written form in My System, part of which was published in 1925. Marienbad was the chance to see Nimzowitsch’s approach on an international stage.
His play here does seem like chess from another dimension and is far more shocking than inoffensive ideas like prophylaxis and overprotection might suggest. The hoarding of potential in constricted positions, wing play at the earliest opportunity, and apparent tergiversation in the formative parts of the game all seemed close to a mockery of classical chess.
If Nimzowitsch, in artistic terms, stood for something like the extremes of abstract expressionism, Akiba Rubinstein was the ascendency of an almost vanishing minimalism — Donald Judd to Nimzowitsch’s Rauschenberg. At this point in his career Rubinstein seemed to be skipping not only the opening but also the middlegame, forgetting altogether such concepts as the initiative, dynamics, and the attack and instead looking for minuscule levers by which he could win in the ending.
From a sporting perspective, Marienbad was a near-perfect imitation of San Sebastián 1912. Nimzowitsch took revenge for his high-stakes loss to Rubinstein in that tournament by winning their individual match-up, but Rubinstein kept his head slightly better down the home stretch than the ever-excitable Nimzowitsch and caught him in the last round.
The tournament was also an important step in the development of the legend of Carlos Torre. It was the single-best placing of his short career — shared third place with Marshall. And it featured the game that he considered the best game he ever played — a convincing win over Fred Yates. It’s not entirely clear what Torre thought was so special about this game, which was impressive but not stunning in its fireworks. The point, probably, is the deep strategic play that went into his attack.
Something about Torre tended to produce hysterics in everyone around him. Gruenfeld, after his 13-move thrashing by Torre at Baden-Baden, had sworn to take revenge but instead was at the receiving end of another brilliancy. After the Yates game, Nimzowitsch loudly exclaimed, "A new genius has arisen in the world of chess."
I don't quite get it with the Yates game but the Gruenfeld game is a good chance to see what all the fuss was about. Torre seems to have a slightly different calculation from anybody else of the relative value of all the pieces, with a slightly greater emphasis on dynamism and mobility. In the Gruenfeld game, for instance, the rook on the open b-file, and the possibility for a rook lift to the kingside, is more than enough for the pawn, even though concrete compensation takes place only many moves after the pawn’s sacrifice.
Marshall was yesterday’s man by 1925 but in his first trip to Europe since before the war he finished in shared third and effortlessly uncorked this Morphyesque game against Haida. He recalled finding everything in Europe "different and sadder" than it had been.
Sources: Gabriel Velasco, The Life and Games of Carlos Torre Repetto, Aron Nimzowitsch, My System, Frank Marshall, My Fifty Years of Chess. introuble2 has a post on it here.
