Hey everyone!

Welcome to what may be another series in my blog! I am writing this first episode as a test, and if it works well, I may continue it over the next few months.

But before explaining, let me start this text with some good news! My latest article, Moments When Chess Changed My Life, has been selected by Chess.com as the Blog of the Month for March. Of course, this was only possible thanks to my readers, who always encourage me to write with lovely feedback. Thank you all for your support!

Back to today's blog, the idea is simple: As a history nerd, I’d like to remember with you some of the key points in the history of our world that have shaped our lives today. Along with them, we'll learn what the chess scene was like at that time and how it was often affected by these historical events.

Today, we are going to revisit the first twenty years of the XX century! The important moments have been arbitrarily chosen by me, so feel free to mention others in the comments. I think the whole idea will be clearer if you just read, so let's get started!

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. 1906

2. 1912

3. 1914

4. 1917

5. 1918

CONCLUSION

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1906

World - First powered flight in Europe

All my readers know about my love for aviation. That's why the first historical fact I chose was the first manned powered flight that was publicly witnessed and filmed. I am talking about the 14-bis, flown by the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont in Bagatelle, France, on October 23rd.

The plane made a flight of about 60 meters (200 ft) at an altitude of 3 to 5 meters (10 to 16 ft). This earned Santos-Dumont the first of the aviation prizes and made him about 3,000 francs richer.

Although the invention of the airplane cannot be attributed to any one individual, and the contribution of the Wright brothers since 1903 has also been essential, the flight of the 14-bis has a symbolic value that makes it, in my opinion, the fundamental stone in the advancement of this type of technology. I hope you can see how much the world was transformed by it.

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Chess - Ostend Tournament

In the same year, Isidor Gunsberg organized one of the biggest chess tournaments of the time, bringing together 36 of the best players in the world in a very long competition that had its final phase played in a nine-player round robin.

The long and confusing format was criticized by several great players, such as world champion Emanuel Lasker, who wrote:

The older masters suffered most from the ordeal. The longer they held out the more pitiable was their breakdown. Verily, it was a chess fair, not a tournament.

American legend Frank James Marshall, despite having played and finished in 7th place, has also spared no criticism:

There ought to be a law against experiments such as these.

Nevertheless, it still attracted a lot of attention from the media and strong names such as Géza Maróczy, Akiba Rubinstein, Dawid Janowski, and champion Carl Schlechter.

To read more about this event, I recommend you read Top Blogger @kahns' blog: A Century of Chess: Ostend 1906. One of the things that struck me most was the fact that the winner received a prize of 4,000 francs.

In other words, in 1906, winning a major chess tournament was worth more than being able to invent something that could fly even though it was heavier than air. Looking at it through the lens of today and the impact on the future, that seems a little unfair to me.

Below, you can check one of its most important matches, in which Schlechter defeats Dawid Janowski.

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1912

World - Sinking of the Titanic

In the early hours of April 15, 1912, one of the most iconic and remarkable events in popular culture took place in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. None other than the sinking of one of the most famous and imposing ships of the time, the RMS Titanic, which met its tragic end on its maiden voyage from Southampton, UK to New York, USA.

Approximately 1,519 people died, while only 705 were saved, resulting in an approximate death rate of 68.3%. However, this tragedy is not only important for its fame or the fact that it led to one of the best films in Hollywood history.

It is also thanks to it that many of today's regulations for passenger transportation, whether by sea, air or land, have been consolidated and have made our travels safer. At least the lives lost, mostly of third-class passengers, were not entirely in vain.

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Chess - El Ajedrecista

It was also in 1912 that El Ajedrecista (The Chess Player) was designed and created. This automaton, built by Leonardo Torres Quevedo in Madrid, was a pioneering autonomous machine capable of playing chess and is also considered the first computer game in history. The machine caused great excitement when it debuted at the University of Paris in 1914.

Therefore, we can say that it is the great-grandfather of Turochamp, Deep Blue, Stockfish, and any other engine you can think of.

Unlike the human-operated Mechanical Turk, which can be considered a fraud, El Ajedrecista had a truly integrated automation built to play chess without human guidance. It was able to play an endgame with three chess pieces, automatically moving a white king and a rook to checkmate the black king, moved by a human opponent.

In 1951, El Ajedrecista defeated Savielly Tartakower at the Paris Cybernetic Conference, being officially the first time a Grandmaster lost to a machine. Of course, it was an endgame where it could force a win, but that is still something cool.

Due to its simple algorithm, the machine did not deliver a checkmate in the minimum possible number of moves, nor could it always deliver a checkmate within the fifty moves allotted by the 50-move rule. However, it was always able to checkmate the opponent.

If the opposing player made an illegal move, El Ajedrecista could detect it and would signal it by turning on a light. If this happened three times, it would stop playing in protest.

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1914

World - World War I

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated in the city of Sarajevo, the provincial capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This event was the spark that ignited one of the largest armed conflicts in history, the First World War, exactly one month later.

Obviously, it is impossible to summarize the entire history of something so impactful in a few paragraphs, and that is not even my intention. What is important is that this war undoubtedly changed the course of Europe and the world forever.

Its consequences ranged from the collapse of many empires of the time, especially the defeated German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, to the formation of new countries such as Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc. Therefore, it naturally shaped the whole geopolitics of the continent.

More about this will be discussed later in this same blog, so keep reading and stay tuned!

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Chess - The Unfinished Tournament

I could talk about the very strong tournament of St. Petersburg in 1914, which ended with the victory of world champion Emanuel Lasker, or tell you more about Chess During World War I In Germany And Austria-Hungary, but @introuble2 did it years before me.

For this text, I think the most important thing to talk about is the 19th DSB (Deutschen Schachbundes) Congress, which took place in Mannheim, Germany, and began on July 20, 1914, just eight days before the outbreak of the conflict. On August 1st, Germany declared war on Russia, and on August 3rd, did the same on France, with Great Britain joining the next day. The tournament is, therefore, famous for having been stopped on August 1, 1914.

The list of players in the Masters event included many strong participants. Among them were:

• Gyula Breyer (Hungary), Richard Réti (Slovakia), and Savielly Tartakower (Poland) from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

• Alexander Alekhine (Russia) and Efim Bogoljubov (Ukraine) from the Russian Empire.

• Siegbert Tarrasch and Ehrhardt Post from the German Empire.

• Dawid Janowski from France.

• Frank James Marshall from the United States.

When the war broke out, Alexander Alekhine was leading the tournament with nine wins, one draw, and one loss. The organizers decided that the players should be "indemnified" according to their scores, but they were not paid the full prize money.

Below is the game between Alekhine and Tarrasch, played on July 30, when the war had already started, and one day before the event was stopped.

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1917

World - Russian Revolution

In 1917, the Russian Revolution took place. This political movement overthrew the imperial government and brought the Bolsheviks to power.

The revolution was sparked by increasing government corruption, the reactionary policies of Tsar Nicholas II, and, of course, Russia's catastrophic losses in World War I, which also caused widespread dissatisfaction among the population.

In February, many riots broke out in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) over food shortages, and when the army finally joined the rebels, the Tsar was forced to abdicate. A provisional government was appointed and attempted to continue Russia's participation in World War I, but it was opposed by the powerful Workers' Soviets, which favored Russian withdrawal from the conflict.

By September, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, had won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. The revolutionaries then launched what is known as the October Revolution, storming the Winter Palace on November 7 and seizing power.

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Chess - National Promotion

Regardless of your opinion about this regime, it is undeniable that the development of chess benefited from it. In fact, the game had already been very popular there since the first Russian Revolution (1905), when it became a cultural outlet and represented intellectual freedom. However, the 1917 revolution and the establishment of the USSR led to chess becoming a national pastime and a symbol of Soviet values.

When the Bolsheviks took power and formed the Soviet Union, they reinforced chess into society. Their leaders believed that by infusing it into the public, they could create stronger citizens who would embody the values of the state. It was also something cheap and easy to spread.

Lenin made chess education mandatory in schools, established state-sponsored training programs, organized tournaments, and used it as a propaganda tool of Soviet superiority. With such strong promotion, the game soon became an important part of the country's culture.

The rest of the story is something you probably already know well. Once these programs took hold, Soviet masters dominated the international chess scene, producing a series of world champions who held the title for several decades.

Among so many of them, we can mention great names like Mikhail Botvinnik, Tigran Petrosian, Mikhail Tal, Boris Spassky, Anatoly Karpov, and Garry Kasparov. Between 1952 and 2002, the USSR, and later Russia, won 24 out of 26 editions of the Chess Olympiad.

Besides that, they developed much of the modern knowledge and contributed a lot to what we understand about chess today.

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1918

World - End of World War I

In 1918, World War I finally came to an end, with the Allies, or the Entente, a coalition of countries led primarily by France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and the USA, emerging victorious over the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria.

The aftermath of this conflict was marked by huge cultural, economic, and social changes, especially in Europe, but also in Asia, Africa, and even in areas of the world not directly involved.

One of them, as you probably know, was Germany, which also went through a great political transformation, becoming a democracy in 1919, with near-universal suffrage for the first time in its history. The harsh penalties imposed on them by the victors through the Treaty of Versailles also gave rise to a revanchist and nationalist sentiment in the population, which culminated in something very well-known, but that should be left for the next episode.

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Chess - Marshall Attack

And what happened on the chess scene in the same year? Well, as you can imagine, most of the big games and tournaments were suspended during the war, but as soon as it was over, our heroes were back in action. Although Emanuel Lasker was still the world champion, the most widely recognized strongest player of the time was the legend José Raúl Capablanca, who was considered unbeatable.

But... people in that decade also thought that the Titanic was unsinkable, so who knows? With that in mind, American champion Frank James Marshall prepared a special surprise in the opening to try and beat the Cuban master. I am talking about the dangerous Marshall Attack!

This attack is a line that occurs in the famous Ruy Lopez opening (1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. O-O Be7 6. Re1 b5 7. Bb3 O-O 8. c3 d5), where Black sacrifices a pawn by playing d5 to gain initiative and a kingside attack. Marshall was confident that he would finally be able to beat his rival with this secret weapon.

On October 23, 1918 (exactly 12 years after the aforementioned first flight by Santos-Dumont in Paris), he finally got his chance to test it in New York, in a game organized especially for the occasion, and... lost anyway. Check out the game below:

Despite the failure, the opening gained popularity, was adopted by many top players, and is still used at the highest level today. It has also led to the development of several "anti-Marshall" lines designed to avoid its complications. Revolutionary!

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CONCLUSION

I hope you enjoyed this blog and learned something new, be it about chess or history in general! Please let me know in the comments if you would like me to continue the series and do the same for other intervals of years. The initial plan would be to write six episodes, always talking about the next 20 years.

Of course, the relationship between world changes and chess is not always too close or connected, but still, I think it is cool and important to understand how our beloved game was going at the same time as some important events.

Below is a table that summarizes what is shown in the text above:

That's it for today! Feedback and constructive criticism are always welcome, as long as they are respectful, so please tell me in the comments what you liked or disliked and how I can improve.

As I usually do with series, the episodes will not be consecutive in order to vary the content of my blog. This means that we will meet again on April 30th with another topic that I hope you will enjoy!

Thank you very much for reading and I'll see you soon!