A Century of Chess: Emanuel Lasker (1900-1909)

A surprise for me playing through the games of this decade is to realize how absent Lasker really was from top-level chess between 1900 and 1907. These probably would have been his absolute peak years, but he played in only two tournaments - winning Paris 1900 and finishing shared second at Cambridge Springs 1904.

Apart from Siegbert Tarrasch, the chess world seemed not particularly to begrudge Lasker his absenteeism. He had been so dominant at London 1899 and Paris 1900 that, even in absentia, he was generally understood to be a cut above the rest of his opposition. And he was generally willing to play a match to defend his title, and the collapse of match negotiations with Tarrasch in 1903, with Marshall in 1905, and with Maróczy in 1906 seem, on the whole, to not have been his fault.

During this period Lasker was focused on a very interesting and poorly understood intellectual project. The usual summary of his activities is that he was taking a break from competitive chess to focus on his academic career. The better way to put it, actually, is that he was attempting to extend his insights on chess into a far-ranging theory of life, with chess as the intellectual cornerstone.

What I haven’t quite been able to work out in my own mind is whether Lasker really was attempting to put childish things behind him - whether he was effectively trying to retire from chess for the sake of a prestigious career as a mathematician and academic and then discovered that his academic career wasn’t developing so smoothly and that he was more of a chess addict than he had supposed - or that, from the very beginning, he was working on a sort of grand unifying theory in which chess was the key to a whole philosophical and scientific system.

Around 1900, Lasker was more or less pursuing a normal academic track. He received his doctorate in mathematics in 1902 and secured an appointment as a lecturer at the University of Manchester. But for one reason or another, academia never took much of an interest in Lasker, and by the middle part of the decade he was back to a more freelance kind of existence as a thinker and chess journalist. His book Struggle is the quintessence of this period - his attempt to articulate a philosophy of struggle. The book is better than its reputation. Some sense of academic insecurity seems to have prompted Lasker to drift away from his usual clear writing style and to write in a concocted Greek terminology (and the discussions of 'machees' and 'stratoi' can make for slow going). But the thesis itself is compelling - that struggle is a kind of essential building block of life, appearing in biology and governing social relations. A philosophy of life follows from that observation, which is that there can be an ideal method of living in the world, which is to achieve knowledge of oneself and to optimize one's aims. "The riddles of the cosmos can therefore be solved in one way only: by investigating the laws and principles which determine the course and the outcome of struggles," writes Lasker. And chess, far from being a trivial pursuit, is understood to be an ideal schooling in the philosophy of struggle - and the "strategic rules valid on the chessboard apply to any combats in general." 

At first blush everything here sounds a little cockeyed, but what Lasker is really taking aim at is the kind of metaphysical totalization that characterized the main strands of philosophy (above all, Kant’s). Lasker’s philosophy attempted to end the view of the universe as a mathematically enclosed deterministic space and to see it instead as an open-ended, free-floating struggle. That conception did not lead, however, to anarchy. Instead, it allowed of a closed domain - that of the macheeide, capable of understanding his own aims perfectly and of achieving them through an "infinite economy" of energy. Lasker’s practical wisdom as a chessplayer clearly informed his views - which may well have been mystifying to the few non-chess players who ever read Struggle - and, clearly, he had felt that his own easy mastery over the chess world served as a kind of object lesson for approaching life in general. “The method is plastic,” he wrote. “It is applicable in every situation.”

During the middle of the 1900s, Lasker’s primary contribution to practical chess was Lasker’s Chess Magazine, of which he was the editor and virtually the sole contributor. I am really grateful to Taylor Kingston for making the entirety of the magazine available in Emanuel Lasker: A Reader. And really, as far as I can tell, it may be the best chess magazine ever published. The analysis is smart, concise, common-sensical, and Lasker’s pen-portraits of his rivals are some of the best glimpses ever recorded of how top-level chess players view each other. The red herring about Lasker is that he played ‘psychological chess’ - i.e. deliberately made inferior moves in order to throw off an opponent. More serious students of Lasker have been convincing in demonstrating that that’s not the case. But he was ‘psychological’ in a particular sense, that he saw chess much the way the Laurence Fishburne character does in Searching for Bobby Fischer, that the struggle was with an opponent, not with objectivity, and that it was possible to modulate one’s strategy given the strengths and weaknesses of the player sitting across the board.

Returning to chess, Lasker finally arranged a world championship match in 1907 - played 11 years after the preceding match - and thrashed Frank Marshall +8-0=8. This was such a staggering result that it almost invalidated itself. Chess history has tended, as a consequence, to see Marshall as being an unsolid and fundamentally not-quite-world-class player. But he had been a terrifying competitor in the years preceding the match, as imaginative and determined a player as anybody in chess history - and Lasker simply annihilated him.

Just as stunning was his defeat of Siegbert Tarrasch +8-3=5 the next year. Tarrasch had really been more qualified than Lasker to challenge Steinitz in 1894 but had let the opportunity pass. Since then there had always been a bit of a whisper campaign that Lasker was a usurper and Tarrasch the rightful champion - which Tarrasch made overt by claiming in 1905 that he should not be the one to challenge Lasker, that Lasker should challenge him, and by taking, after his win at Ostend 1907, the title of 'tournament champion of the world'. And Tarrasch was a very worthy rival - and Lasker, especially towards the middle of the match, simply played on another level from him. The beginning of the match was its hardest-fought phase. Tarrasch won smoothly in Game 3 and Lasker won games 2 and 4 as if by a miracle. But with convincing wins in Games 5 and 7, Lasker seemed to be seeing the board in ways that his opponent simply couldn’t follow. “Surprising and amazing!" a chastened Tarrasch wrote of one maneuver in Game 7. "This game was conducted flawlessly by my opponent," he wrote of Game 5. It’s one of the rare instances in chess - the fate of Bobby Fischer’s 1971 match rivals come to mind as well - of seeing a truly world-class player coming up again a chess intelligence greater than his own.

Lasker completed the decade with a smooth win over David Janowski. Take the three matches together - with the combined score of +25-6=15 - and Lasker has a claim to being in the short list of dominant performances by a reigning champion. Add to that his matches against Janowski and Schlechter in 1910 and his tournament performance at St Petersburg 1909 and his score for this period jumps to +47-8=27, which puts his record for 1907-1910 in the conversation for the most dominant stretches in chess history.

Lasker's Style

1. Imbalances

The key, I’m convinced, to understanding Lasker’s often enigmatic play is that he was looking constantly for imbalances in the position. This is the kind of approach to the game that’s discussed by somebody like Jeremy Silman and is usually considered not-quite-top-of-the-line chess, but that was central to the way Lasker played. He was less interested in positional harmony than in finding some imbalance somewhere that gave him a concrete course of action. He was chess’ leading ‘wrong player’ (in contrast to Tarrasch, Rubinstein, Schlechter who were all ‘right’ players). This trait gave him a poor reputation with a later generation of theoreticians. Réti claimed that he made "intentionally bad moves" as a means of discombobulating his opponents. Euwe said, “It is not possible to learn from Lasker, only stand and wonder.” Fischer called him “a coffeehouse player.” But for a later wave - Korchnoi and players like Suba, Miles, and Watson - Lasker was the idol. What he showed was that there were many paths to Rome, and that it was possible to reach the highest possible level simply by playing vigorously and concretely, with a shrewd common sense.

2. Defense

It’s interesting that Lasker is so closely associated with defense given that he wasn’t some sort of theoretical advocate of the resources of the defender in the way that, say, Nimzowitsch and Petrosian were. It was more that, in Suba’s phrase, he saw chess mastery as being a willingness to “take calculated risks” and knew that, if for most players ‘risk’ meant a daring attack, it was equally a risk to grab a pawn or take some long-term advantage while coming under a withering but ultimately survivable attack. Lasker’s defensive technique was almost never doughty or passive. He looked to counterattack at the earliest available opportunity, and - moving towards the domain of psychology - he had a gift for inviting ‘critical positions’ and forcing an opponent to make difficult choices.

3. Resourcefulness

This is the quality that everybody noticed about Lasker, his ability to stay cool and to keep fighting no matter what. "Dr Lasker may lose a game sometimes but lose his head never,” wrote Tarrasch, reduced, despite all his ingrained instincts, to praising Lasker. As Euwe said, there may not be all that much to learn from this trait of Lasker’s. My sense with him is that he was simply very smart and had very good nerves - but there is inspiration in Lasker’s resourcefulness for players who are not of his caliber, an understanding that, even for a top level player, it is possible to be lost several times over in a game that one goes on to win.

Lasker in the Opening

I find Lasker’s opening play to be a bit mystifying. He often seemed to choose oddly toothless lines, 4.Bd3 in the French or the Steinitz Ruy Lopez. A certain amount of his celebrated defensive prowess was the result simply of getting outplayed in the opening. On the other hand, Lasker couldn’t help being brilliant and in the opening as well proved to be an innovator. The Lasker Defense in the Evans Gambit and Lasker Variation in the Queen’s Gambit Declined cut the Gordian Knot in both openings. His line in the Evans - a common sense method for returning some material and avoiding complications - essentially put the Evans out of business. And his line in the Queen Gambit’s Declined upended orthodox beliefs about how the opening must be played and gave black the opportunity - through a stark imbalance - to equalize the position as early as move 5. In Lasker’s Chess Magazine, he wrote, "I believe that the value of 'pawn formations' has come to be greatly exaggerated. In my opinion that pawn formation is best that interferes least with the play of the pieces. In any case it is vastly subordinate to energetic piece play as developed by Morphy." As a practical player, Lasker’s trump card was his skill in queenless endgames, and in big games he tended to select, as white, the Spanish Exchange Variation and, as black, the Berlin Defense and was astonishingly successful with both of them. With the Spanish Exchange he scored +18-1 in his career and was particularly deadly with it in the 1909 match against Janowski.

Sources

I was getting ready to post this a couple of weeks ago and was scooped by simaginfan, who has a terrific piece on Lasker. Lasker's style has been notoriously difficult to describe, so it's interesting to me that we settled independently on pretty much the same set of terms - simaginfan selects 'strategic imbalances,' 'resourcefulness in difficult positions,' and 'maneuvering' as his trinity of Lasker qualities. Andrew Soltis has a first-rate book, Why Lasker Matters, which is largely a refutation of Réti's theory that Lasker was a 'psychological player.' But, among the many books that have been written about Lasker, the best by far is Taylor Kingston's Emanuel Lasker: A Reader  which is a compendium of Lasker's own writing and nicely crystallizes his profundity as a thinker, both in chess and in philosophy.