A Century of Chess: Siegbert Tarrasch (1900-1909)
When I was first learning to play chess, I went to the bookstore at the old Manhattan Chess Club and very carefully selected three volumes. One of them was Tarrasch's The Game of Chess - and I can remember the clerk murmuring "Very good choices" like I was being inducted into some secret society. And my first real success came directly out of The Game of Chess - learning a line in the Max Lange Attack and then springing it, minutes afterwards, on Bruce Pandolfini in a simultaneous exhibition.
That seems pretty much par for the course for how a whole century of chess players became intoxicated with the game. Irving Chernev, taking things to extremes, removed the cover of The Game of Chess and replaced it with a handmade cover saying 'Holy Bible.' During his lifetime Tarrasch was the Praeceptor Germaniae - the Teacher of Germany - and essentially synonymous with the German School of Chess.
And so one thing that surprised me as I've been working on this series and reading more about classical chess is how deeply disliked Tarrasch was by his contemporaries. James Mortimer wrote, surprisingly openly, in the British Chess Magazine, "Dr. Tarrasch is scrupulously correct in his personal demeanor but I doubt if he is particularly popular with other players." Grigory Levenfish, who saw Tarrasch at the St Petersburg 1914 tournament, wrote that his "impertinent and self-assured manner made an unpleasant impression."
I think I'd kind of assumed that everybody in this era was a bit pompous in comparison to the looser style that came in later on and that Tarrasch's famous arrogance didn't necessarily seem so out-of-place, but apparently he really was impossible. I get the sense that there was a sharp division between the audience at a chess tournament who saw him, as Horace Cheshire wrote in 1896, "as a neat well-dressed sprightly gentleman of very engaging manners and always with a fresh flower in his buttonhole" - in other words, the exquisite image of how a chess grandmaster should comport himself - and then his fellow competitors who were well aware that Tarrasch looked down on them as glorified hustlers while he was a doctor occasionally condescending sometimes to take apart in competitions and who had to endure also his game analyses, in which he was inevitably right about everything. "There is no game on earth played by anybody but Dr. Tarrasch in which he would not point out a mistake or a faster road to victory or improvement of some kind," wrote Lasker. As a teenager, Aron Nimzowitsch was so incensed by one of these analysis sessions he had with Tarrasch that, as he wrote, he dedicated essentially the rest of his life to knocking Tarrasch off his pedestal. "My hostility was fueled by a deep ideological antagonism that I felt ever since we met," Nimzowitsch wrote. "I've always considered him mediocre. Yes, he was a very strong player, but all his views, sympathies and antipathies, and inability to create new thoughts - all that obviously proved the mediocrity of his personality. I've always loved genius, and I couldn't put up with the fact that the leader of a dominating school was a mediocre man! That fact exasperated me! And I'd like to say that if I didn't feel that enmity towards Tarrasch, I wouldn't have really learned to play chess. To play stronger than Tarrasch - that was my desire. And here's an advice for my readers: 'if you wish to achieve results choose a mortal enemy for yourself and try to dethrone him."
Tarrasch was born in Breslau in 1862, studied medicine in Berlin, started a successful practice in Nuremberg, and had what seemed to be an immaculately bourgeois life - married, with five children, a private practice, and a flourishing hobby, as one of the best chess players in the world. Tarrasch was Jewish but elected, as far as I can tell, to be more German than the Germans - and, in a not-uncommon move in that era, converted to Christianity in 1909. As a chess player, he reached the elite level with ridiculous ease. That seems largely to have been a case of 'right place right time' - he was exposed to Steinitz's theories and to the active chess scene in Berlin and, in short order, in his own play, fashioned the 'classical school,' in which, as Richard Réti wrote, "He combined the technique of Steinitz with an otherwise common chess practice of fast development (Steinitz had a tendency to neglect that), thus creating a playing style that remains a fundamental cornerstone of chess till this day."
As ever, Emanuel Lasker proved to be the chess world's most adept psychologist - and had the shrewdest understanding of Tarrasch. "Dr Tarrasch’s strength or weakness, if one likes – is his pronounced amour propre," Lasker wrote in 1906, as he was preparing for a match with Tarrasch. "Without it he would have been a very mediocre chessplayer; gifted to an abnormal degree, he has become a giant. His amour propre is such that he must excel in something. Chess was, as it were, the easiest medium for him to choose." This puts Tarrasch into the category of the eternal optimists - Botvinnik, Taimanov, Fischer, Kramnik - players who sit down before every game just assuming that they're going to win and finding it to be some disorder in the laws of the universe if they accidentally draw or lose. Which can of course be a very effective mindset for a competitive athlete - if more than a little off-putting for an opponent. Lasker continued, "In his personal life he is, like many Germans of the better classes, always 'correct.' To be 'correct' signifies, in Germany, the attitude of a man whose conduct, in the judgment of his neighbors, is always proper and befitting his station. It is the same in chess. He always tries to find the “correct” move which, if his understanding of it is analyzed, is the move which, in the opinion of the best judges, would satisfy all requirements. As he is very painstaking and earnest in his studies, his strength in chess is exceedingly great. But still one cannot help feeling that it is acquired, not born in him, for he follows the progress of ideas but never leads it."
That seems like the right context for the surprisingly deep-seated and vituperative quarrel between Lasker and Tarrasch. Fundamentally, it's a dispute between the bourgeoisie and bohemianism - the 'correct' Germans and the wayward Germans. And, as he got closer to the 1908 match, Lasker cast their opposition in even more philosophical terms: "Tarrasch writes upon chess, explains it, and plays it in the same way - [a style] that is broad and deep but wanting in solid foundation. If the strategy of chess be such as is mirrored in his mind then it is a marvelous absolutely incomprehensible thing. If the world were fashioned on this model it would be a glistening palace. I, for my part, like the strength, the sane strength, that will dare the extreme of attaining the unattainable. We are very different and if the truth must be told we don’t love each other. But the match between us will be an interesting one anyway."
The editor of the British Chess Magazine, in which this quote was included, seemed to have no idea whatsoever of what Lasker had in mind, but it's clear enough: Tarrasch represented a vision of rectitude, of the 'correctly'-played game, while Lasker stood for a philosophy of 'struggle,' with ideas always in a tangle, and a hard-nosed pragmatism - combined with ingenuity - always prevailing. And Lasker's win in 1908 was really an epochal event - and shaped, almost more so than any other match, the way that the chess world perceived top-level play. The way I'd put it is that Tarrasch comes to seem like a very self-assured secondary school teacher - completely confident in his domain and his mastery of his discipline - but as players progress in chess, they come to feel that there is a deeper truth to the game, which is what Nimzowitsch had in mind when he accused Tarrasch of 'mediocrity,' or what William Napier meant when he said that "Tarrasch is now and seemingly ever will be one of the best, only this and no more" - and players like Lasker, Nimzowitsch, Bronstein, Tal are more college-level and represent a challenge to Tarrasch's smooth simplicities.
And there's something very moving about Tarrasch's later years - starting with his crushing loss to Lasker in 1908. His self-regard notwithstanding, he could be generous to others in his notes and in his writing about the match he seemed sometimes to recognize that he actually was dealing with a superior intelligence and a different way of conceiving of the game. He was capable of writing of, for instance, the fifth game, "This game was conducted flawlessly by my opponent," and, of his play towards the middle of the match, wrote with surprising humility, "Step by step, I was playing better."
1908 marked the end of Tarrasch's long period as a world title contender, and he was faced with more serious problems. His Paul committed suicide in 1912. Fritz was killed on the Western Front in 1915, Hans was run over by a streetcar in Munich in 1916 - which may also have been a suicide. His wife left him and brought their daughter with her. By this stage, there’s a Job-like sense about Tarrasch, combined of course with the complete collapse of German society in World War I. In 1914, he moved to Munich, which would have meant of the long-standing Nuremberg practice. Al Horowitz mentions that his non-invitation to the New York tournament of 1924 “broke his spirit.” And then at the very end of his life - Tarrasch died in 1934 - the Nazis came to power with their crosshairs exactly on Tarrasch’s class of assimilated Jew. Everything here feels like a Thomas Mann novel or something - a crystalline distillation of the tragedy of the German Jewish bourgeoisie - dedicating on entire life to being the perfect correct German and then having it collapse in the most horrific way possible.
In terms of chess results, Tarrasch’s real peak years were in the 1880s and 1890s - there’s almost no question that if he had carried through on an arranged match with Steinitz in the early 1890s he would have won and may well have had a long reign as world champion. In the 1900s, he had a series of tournaments, in which his performance was only fair, but he also had three great results. At the marathon Monte Carlo tournament of 1903, he had a slow start, but overtook the leaders with a streak of eight straight wins.
In 1905, he defeated Frank Marshall +8-1=8 - a really startling result given that Marshall was at the peak of his career and playing with phenomenal energy and creativity.
And in 1907, he won the much-heralded Ostend championship section, which gave him the short-lived title of tournament champion of the world.
The controversies around Tarrasch’s personality and ‘dogmatism’ can sometimes obscure what a truly great player he was - although my sense is that he was a great player in the way that Botvinnik was great, he wasn’t exactly a genius, more a chess athlete. He excelled at preparation, technique, had a a certain ‘system’ for conducting the strategic struggle which enabled him to win many of his games with startling ease, and, above all, he had the critical competitive ability for maintaining composure and stamina. Napier wrote that his stamina was “worthy of a marathon runner” and “rendered him superior to everything but the pelting of downright genius.” Capablanca vividly remembered Tarrasch’s posture during important games, “staring fixedly at the chess board for fully an hour, so intently that one would think his sight was piercing the table, perfectly rigid, not even the smallest muscle twitching, straight-backed and with an almost painful seriousness in his face – a living statue….thinking long and painfully over his moves for to Tarrasch the loss of a game is worse than the tortures of hell.”
But great as a player as he was, Tarrasch’s most abiding legacy is in his writing - and in his writing he could be witty and self-effacing with relatively little of the pompousness that ruined his in-person relationships. And I think the best way to tribute to Tarrasch is just to line up a few of his best quotes:
- Tempo is the soul of chess.
- It is not enough to be a strong player: one must also play well.
- Mistrust is the most necessary quality of the chess-player.
- Between the opening and endgame the gods have placed the middlegame.
- If one piece stands badly, all the pieces stand badly.
- The Queen's Gambit is the chamber music of chess.
- Each position must be regarded as a problem where it is a question of finding the best move, often the only one, demanded by that position.
And then Tarrasch, in the introduction to The Game of Chess, wrote what is - for my money - the most beautiful lines ever written about chess:
- I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess, just as I have pity for the man who does not know love. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy.
Tarrasch's Style:
1. Space
Tarrasch had an extremely simple formula for winning the majority of his games. He played some kind of forthright, classical opening, taking his share of the center. Then he played for space, gradually and inexorably squeezing out his opponent’s position. Eventually, a pawn came loose and Tarrasch converted in the endgame. Tarrasch had such startling success with this technique that it’s no wonder he was so skeptical of the avant gardism of the hypermodern school - he knew from years of experience just how crucial space was and it seems that it almost didn’t occur to him that there could be other values within chess.
2. Little Centre
Closely aligned with the emphasis on space is Tarrasch’s virtuosity with the ‘Little Centre’ e.g. a white pawn on e4 playing against a black pawn on d6. I came across this concept in Ludek Pachman’s Modern Chess Strategy and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it brought up again, but it was an important tool of the trade in classical chess, particularly in standard formations of the Philidor and Steinitz Defenses - white obtains has a space advantage from the opening, has freedom of maneuver for his pieces within his own lines, and builds up towards an attack.
3. Active Endgames
More than anything else, though, it was Tarrasch’s skill in the endgame that made him a top player. His gift for the endgame was largely about seeing the endgame as an extension of the middlegame - with piece activity equally paramount. And, as with Botvinnik, his tireless energy and careful calculation made him nearly mistake-free.
Tarrasch in the Opening
Tarrasch is one of the all-time greats of the Ruy Lopez, with the Lopez giving him exactly the sort of position that was second-nature for him, a safe, steady, space advantage out of the opening, combining possibilities of an attack with positional play across the board.
As black, Tarrasch’s dictum was to play for space and counter-attack as early as possible, and this made him adopt the Tarrasch Defense to the Queen’s Gambit (3…c5) as, essentially, the only principled move. “I can only repeat over and over again that this is the only defense leading to equality in the Queen's Gambit,” he wrote. The Hypermoderns didn’t particularly take aim at this opening, but its shortcomings were already evident by the late 1900s (and the opening serves as a kind of metaphor for the limits of Tarrasch’s school of play) - for the sake of some activity, black is saddled with a long-term weakness in his isolated pawn, and, when faced with a top-level opponent, will gradually be forced back into a defensive position.
Sources: There's of course lots about Tarrasch online. I've mined Edward Winter's page for most of the pictures in this post. Andre Schulz has some information I haven't seen elsewhere about Tarrasch's personal life.
