A Century of Chess: Siegbert Tarrasch (1920-29)

I had fully expected to finish up with Tarrasch last decade — and had said really everything I had to say about him — and so it was a slightly unpleasant discovery to realize that, according to my qualification system, he was also one of the top players of the ‘20s and that I had to give him yet another post.

The chess world had left Tarrasch behind by this time. He was, famously, the whipping boy for Aron Nimzowitsch in his articulation of hypermodern theory. Tarrasch had opposed hypermodernism in toto — he accused its practitioners of cowardice and of playing a "caricature" of chess — and by the ‘20s he had clearly been proved wrong: there obviously was something to these strange, new-fangled ideas. The chess world had tired also of his imperious personality — conspicuously, he was left off the invite list to New York 1924, a slight which, apparently, devastated him. And Tarrasch suffered a long string of personal misfortunes. All three of his sons died in the 1910s — one in combat, one by suicide, one in a streetcar accident. His practice suffered reverses and his marriage fell apart. Then, Tarrasch was a Jew in Germany and must have suffered from the vicissitudes of Germany’s agony in the 1920s and from the rise of Nazism and anti-semitism.

But whatever Tarrasch’s misfortunes, and whatever one might say about him personally, he was really good at chess — and his adherence to classicism in the thick of hypermodernism helped to showcase the abundant resources of classical chess. Tarrasch played as he always did — he grabbed as much space as possible, he looked to crash through with an attack and if that was impossible to slowly constrict an opponent and eventually get a pawn to come loose, and he played with striking accuracy in the endgame. As a style, it wasn’t à la mode but it still got results and it produced beautiful chess, as in the following two games.