A Century of Chess: Savielly Tartakower (1920-29)

Probably my favorite player.

Tartakower was born in 1887 in Rostov, then part of the Russian Empire. His father owned a textile factory and Tartakower remembered his childhood as one long holiday — the family vacationing all across Russia. You can probably imagine Tartakower’s childhood as being, essentially, a Nabokov novel — and the suggestion was even made to Nabokov to study Tartakower when he was working on The Luzhin Defense.

In 1911, the idyll abruptly came to an end when both Tartakower’s parents were killed in a pogrom following the assassination of Pyotr Stolypin. Tartakower, at the time pursuing law in Vienna, described the incident in a poem: "He took and opened the telegram / Your parents were killed / Flew in. Buried. / Two bloody graves." His brother had to be restrained from returning to Russia and hunting down the pogromists. 

Tartakower’s personal life would remain almost entirely a mystery — he simply didn’t speak of it — but the turmoil of his parents' deaths and then the war drove him from what would have been a comfortable existence to one of precarity. In any case, though, it is not really clear that he ever was cut out to be a lawyer. In a memoir that he characteristically entitled “words of warning” he describes, as a 17-year-old, coming across a chess club and then, instead of turning into "a good physician or skillful lawyer becoming instead — a mere grandmaster at chess." He made rapid progress and by 19 was playing in international tournaments. As early as 1910, in Edward Lasker’s reminiscence, Tartakower seems sincerely to have believed that he would someday soon be world champion. His results, though, weren’t exactly spectacular — shared third at Vienna 1907, eighth at Ostend B 1907, fourteenth at Karlsbad 1907, shared seventh at Vienna 1908, eleventh at St Petersburg 1909, eleventh at Hamburg 1910. 

In World War I, Tartakower served as a lieutenant with the Austro-Hungarian army, winning several medals. He described himself as "being healthy and cheerful, like a trout in a mountain stream," but once again there was tragedy surrounding the jaunty Tartakower persona — his brother Arthur died in combat in 1914. 

Around 1919, he seems finally to have concluded that he would make a full-time living as a chess player — he never practiced law, although he kept the “Dr” permanently affixed to his name — and from there until, really, the end of his life was a fixture on the chess scene. He was something like the platonic idea of a grandmaster — how people might imagine an elite chess player if they have never actually met one — perfectly cosmopolitan, endlessly intellectual, possessed of consummate grace, and sparkling in his conversation. He spoke Russian, German, French, and English with complete fluency, had a deep knowledge of Latin and Greek, and could apparently hold his own in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. He wrote constantly — a book of poetry, a book on the Russian Revolution, and endless chess books and articles — often preparing his annotations of a game as he was playing it. "He was universally beloved and admired wherever chess is played," The British Chess Magazine wrote. He had "no enemies," Sosonko wrote. And he was witty. Golembek wrote that he was "the wittiest man I ever met." Just about every clever saying you can think of about chess comes ultimately from Tartakower. Here is just a sampler:

- "The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake."

- "I never defeated a healthy opponent." 

- "The mistakes are all just waiting to be made." 

- "It will never be possible to conduct the battle to the full satisfaction of the loser." 

- "Capture first and philosophize later." 

- "Castling is the first step towards a well-ordered life." 

- "It is only a strong player who knows how weakly he plays." 

- "In the opening we hope we are better, in the middlegame we think we are better, and in the ending we are hopelessly lost."

But it wasn’t only the sayings. Everything Tartakower wrote seemed to come out like this. The old chess guard in his writing emerged as the "grand panjandrums," Tarrasch was invariably quoted as "thus sprach Tarraschustra," and Tartakower's more absurdic proverbs would tend to have their attribution as "pearls of eastern wisdom." 

And what you may have noticed is that under the wit is a very deep melancholy — like a sad clown’s — which seems like the absolute essence of a sardonic Old World sensibility. Salo Flohr noticed that he never "laughed with all his heart." Tartakower described himself as "one of those unlucky skeptics who never overlook the dark side of even the happiest experience." It was like everything in his being was organized into the shape of a paradox, with the cosmic joke always paired with a deep sense of the tragic. 

Our image of Tartakower is so dominated by his maxims and the sense of him as the court jester of the grandmaster club that it’s easy to forget about his chess-playing — and that he was really good! He had his breakthrough in 1920, when he finished second at Berlin, and then landed in the winners' circle at Budapest 1921, The Hague 1921, Teplitz-Schönau 1922, and Vienna 1922, a string of results that brought him into the world championship conversation, as certified when Capablanca invited him to be a signatory to the London Rules in 1922. He never quite got back to the level he had from 1920-22, but he got surprisingly close to a world championship match when the British Chess Federation, getting slightly overexcited during the London 1927 tournament, a tournament that Tartakower was winning at the time, declared that they would sponsor a challenge by the winner. Unfortunately, Tartakower weakened down the stretch and was caught by Nimzowitsch — and the Brits, faced with a tie, seemed to lose interest. And that may have been just as well. As strong as Tartakower was, his play lacked a certain solidity — always taking the last word, Tartakower called that his “saving grace” — and it’s very hard to imagine him winning a match against either Alekhine or Capablanca. His tournament performances weakened slightly from there, although he was still able to place strongly in international tournaments into the 1940s.

He had settled in Paris — "the only city where living is possible," he said — and in his 50s fought with the Free French, showing the same courage he had with the Austro-Hungarian army and then in countless of his chess games. He never married — "I'm too brave and too poor," he said, and an acquaintance noted that that side of life "completely passed him by." He was the quintessence of a type of European bachelor, and suffered from the usual vice of that type — an incurable addiction to gambling. He would often place bets in a nearby casino while his opponent was thinking over a move, and his sense of principle meant unfortunately that he always paid his debts. "It's money and it only exists to be spent" was one of his more unfortunate aphorisms, and he paid the price for that — dying in poverty in 1956. 

Tartakower's Style

1.Skirmishing. It's very hard to distinguish between elements of Tartakower’s playing style. As varied and creative as his games were, they all somehow feel the same. Basically, they are a mirror of his personality — endlessly playful and witty. I think of his style as ‘skirmishing’ — as opposed to direct battle. It tends to involve fighting all over the board and, often, situations where it’s not so easy to tell who’s attacking and who’s defending, as in his wild game with Bogoljubow below. Skirmishing is maybe less famous in chess history than it should be. Emanuel Lasker was the quintessential skirmisher. Tartakower represents a link in the chain of skirmishing. Miquel Najdorf, Tartakower’s protégé — who always referred to Tartakower as ‘my teacher’ — picked up the torch from him. And Najdorf would go on to influence David Bronstein, Viktor Korchnoi, and a whole Soviet school of great skirmishers. 

2.Sense of Humor. You don’t necessarily think of sense of humor as one of the main weapons in a grandmaster’s repertoire, but some of his games are, incredibly enough, very funny — defeating Rubinstein with an Evans Gambit or Maróczy with an impossible-to-analyze rook sacrifice.

3.Cat and mouse. This is closely connected to sense of humor, but there’s an approach to chess that’s all about ‘finesses,’ about catching an opponent slightly off balance — getting him to castle first, to overcommit himself, that sort of thing, and then always, always staying a bit more flexible. 

Tartakower in the Opening

One of Tartakower’s bons mots was: "as long as an opening is reputed to be bad, it can be tried." What he meant was that the theory was played out in most of the mainstream openings, but that any ‘bad opening’ tended to have hidden resources in it — and he pursued that approach at a strikingly high level. Tartakower introduced innovative ideas in the Dutch, the English, and the Sicilian. He invented the Orangutan on a visit to the zoo during New York 1924 — something about the way orangutan was throwing mud reminded him of 1.b4. Asked to invent an opening for Barcelona 1929, he came up with the Catalan, which of course is now considered one of the classiest openings in white’s repertoire. 

Sources: Genna Sosonko has an article on Tartakower — which as far as I know is not translated into English. Sergei Voronkov digs into Tartakower's origins here. Edward Winter has an article on Tartakower here. Tartakower wrote many books, of which My Best Games of Chess is the best guide to his career.