Why Lasker Matters (eBook)

Introduction

“The greatest of the champions was, of course, Emanuel Lasker.” – Mikhail Tal

“Emanuel Lasker ... was a coffeehouse player.” – Bobby Fischer

“The idea of chess art is unthinkable without Emanuel Lasker.” – Alexander Alekhine

“I admired him ... until I studied his games.” – Bent Larsen

“My chess hero.” – Viktor Korchnoi

“The quality of (19th century games) games ... they are horrible. Even Steinitz-Zukertort, Steinitz-Lasker (groans). – Garry Kasparov

Emanuel Lasker is a controversy. But he’s also a mystery: How could someone who played so many profound and yet so many second-best moves have become world champion? And how could someone who played so many dull and also so many sparkling games – in short, so much bad chess as well as great chess – have remained champion for a record 27 years?

The answer that comes to the minds of many young players is that some stars of Lasker’s era would be, well, no better than mere masters today. There’s some evidence to support this. The level of play, particularly in defense, was poor when Lasker began to play, and endgame technique was uneven, to say the least. But Lasker’s opponents included Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Botvinnik, Max Euwe, Jose Capablanca, Akiba Rubinstein, Yefim Bogolyubov, Richard Reti, Frank Marshall and Siegbert Tarrasch. They were much more than mere masters, to say the least. And his total record against the group is a big plus score.

Another explanation is that Lasker remained at the top for so long simply because he played so rarely. There is evidence for this, too. Lasker often went years between tournaments and world championship matches. But whenever he returned he was surprisingly active and surprisingly strong. Garry Kasparov once declared that he had “won the world championship title three times in three years, a record for chess history!” In fact, he didn’t. No one has ever won three championship matches in three years. But the closest was Lasker, who did it in four years.

Lasker’s contemporaries had their own explanations for his remarkable accomplishments: He beat Wilhelm Steinitz in their first match because he didn’t blunder and because he wasn’t 58 years old, they said. But that hardly explains how Lasker went on to amass a tournament record over the next 35 years that Reti said “must be considered the most successful of all chess masters.”

Tarrasch gave three answers to the Lasker riddle. Early in Lasker’s career Tarrasch presented the case that his fellow German was simply lucky. In his tournament book for Nuremberg 1896, he itemized examples of Lasker’s good fortune in a “luck scoretable” that explained why Lasker finished at the top of the real scoretable. Later Tarrasch had another explanation. He “circulated the legend that Lasker had a simple plan of play: trade off all the heavy pieces and go into the endgame,” Aron Nimzovich said. Still later, Tarrasch came up with a third answer: Lasker hypnotized his opponents. Only that can explain how the world’s best players made bad moves against him that they would never consider against anyone else, he said.

And then there was Euwe, who said there was simply no way to imitate Lasker. “It is not possible to learn much from him,” Euwe wrote, “One can only stand and wonder.” That view – that someone could play chess so powerfully and yet inexplicably – was exactly the kind of fuzzy thinking that would have outraged Lasker.

THE PSYCH HOAX

Long before Lasker, there were masters who made their decisions in the most practical way: They tried to find the moves that had the greatest chance of success, regardless of whether they were “correct.” After Adolf Anderssen lost three straight games in his match with Paul Morphy he abandoned 1 e4, in favor of 1 a3?!. Another of Morphy’s opponents met his 1 e4 with 1...f6? to avoid the American’s huge book knowledge. (It worked—he won.) Morphy himself switched strategies after he got off to relatively poor starts in his matches with Louis Paulsen and Daniel Harrwitz. Capablanca suggested that a player could take the practical approach even if he didn’t know his opponent. When Capa adopted a dubious Ruy Lopez line in a 1914 clock simultaneous he explained, “This defense is not good but I used it in the conviction that my opponent would not know what to play.”

But the pragmatic attitude was discredited by Wilhelm Steinitz. He said Morphy used his great “intuitive knowledge of human nature” to “play the man rather than the board.” Morphy’s quaint approach could now be retired, Steinitz added. In his era, science had great cache and Steinitz claimed to have applied the scientific method to formulate eternal rules. Anyone could apply these rules against an opponent. Only the board mattered. “My opponent might as well be an abstraction or an automaton,” Steinitz wrote.

It is well nigh impossible to underestimate the influence that Steinitz (and his disciple Tarrasch) had on chess thinking during their era. As a result when Lasker arrived on the scene – and successfully violated the Steinitz/Tarrasch rules – his success was a mystery. What could explain it?

Reti thought he figured it out when he read an interview Lasker gave to the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf after his victory at New York 1924. Lasker said that some of his opponents have recognizable quirks, such as Geza Maroczy who was better at defense than attack. Reti concluded that Lasker “is not so much interested in making the objectively best move as he is in making those most disagreeable to his opponent.” In other words, Lasker played the man.

But then Reti went completely off the rails: Lasker often accomplishes this, he wrote, “by means of intentionally bad moves.” This is nonsense.

If this were true, Lasker would not have been just a 2500-player as some of today’s players believe. Or a 2700-plus-player as retroactive ratings suggest. If Lasker could deliberately play badly against the world’s best players – and regularly beat them – he would have been over 3000.

The primary evidence cited by Reti and his successors in advancing the psychology hoax are:

–Lasker played obviously bad opening moves – such as g2-g4 in the Dragon Sicilian.

–He gave up material for something hard to define, something called “positional compensation.”

–He often played the “practical” move rather than try to find the best move, and

–He counterattacked and complicated even before his position was clearly bad.

Today’s players should look at this and laugh. In a typical Sicilian Defense nowadays you might see g2-g4 by White, a Black counterattack by move 10, a positional sack by either player and “practical” moves by both. No one would consider the moves deliberately bad or the slightest bit “psychological.”

Nevertheless, Reti offered a simple way of explaining the inexplicable – and Lasker was the perfect subject since his moves were often so original they defied any other explanation.

Lasker – Levenfish
Moscow 1936

White to play

White’s center is collapsing. His chances of survival seem slim after 27 cxb4 ♘xd4 or 27 ♗xc6 ♗xc6 28 cxb4 ♕xd4+. Some computers recommend retreat (27 ♕f2) although that would likely lose without a fight (27...bxc3 28 ♗xc3 ♘xe5 29 fxe5 ♗xe5).

Lasker played 27 ♖e3! so that he could attack with ♕h4 and ♖h3. It’s a good try in a bad position. But even if everything worked out, all that White threatens is a check on h7.

Yet Black called it “one of those moves which time and again have given Lasker the chance to save himself in a difficult position. When his strategic plan proves to be refuted, Lasker boldly and skillfully creates tactical complications and nearly always comes out of them the victor.”

That was the case here: 27...bxc3 28 ♗xc3 ♘xe5 29 fxe5 ♗xe5 30 ♕h4 ♖xc3? 31 ♖xc3 ♗xd4+ 32 ♔h1 ♗a4 (32...♗xc3 33 ♕d8+!) 33 ♖dd3 ♗b5 34 ♗xg6! fxg6 35 ♖h3 ♕d7 36 ♖cg3 ♗d3? 37 ♖xd3 Resigns.

Today we would say White complicated because he had to. But in Lasker’s day 27 ♖e3 was considered his special brand of sorcery. And Reti revealed the magician’s trick: His moves were part of elaborate mind games. In the 1920s “psychology” was a buzzword, just as “science” had been a few decades before, and so the mind-game explanation came into vogue. Nimzovich, for example, used “psychology” and “psychologically” nine times in his slim volume on Carlsbad 1929 to explain moves.

The hoax that Reti “foisted on the world” – to use Gerald Abrahams words – allowed annotators to become arm-chair Freuds. If you couldn’t explain a move, there was a simple answer. Psychology! In Game 81 Maroczy adopted a variation of the French Defense as White that Maroczy himself had discredited as Black years before. No one could explain why he did this. The possibility that the world’s leading authority on the French...