Why bother to bone up on Steinitz? (2/2)

Why bother to bone up on Steinitz? (2/2)

IM Craig Pritchett explains why we should all study the 19th Century Greats

Part One took the reader briskly through the history of the game’s so-called ‘Romantic Age’, from Bourdonnais’ early 1830s’ combinative example to the high point of those two great mid-century giants, Anderssen and Morphy. By the 1860s, chess knowledge had hugely expanded and these more innocent, open attacking times were ripe for seismic change.

Steinitz eventually evolved his own theory of the accumulation of small advantages. He and others, consciously or not, had to adapt. The evergreen Anderssen, who continued to compete successfully at the very top, despite giving away two decades or more to almost all of his peers in his last two decades, was among the successful adapters. Consider the following game, whose spectacular brilliance derives far less from anything ‘romantic’ in character than from the stricter dictates of a thoroughly sound and hard-hitting opening.

Adolf Anderssen (1818-1879) features in an instructive Everyman work by Pritchett, "Chess Secrets: Great Chess Romantics".

Steinitz also recognised that the great Paul Morphy would have effortlessly coped with the game’s changing trends, if he hadn’t abruptly ‘retired’ from all top-class competition, the ‘Pride and Sorrow’ of the game, at the very end of the 1850s.

Of Kolisch, who also effectively abandoned chess in the mid-1860s (eventually to become a wealthy financier, chess patron and Austrian ‘baron’), Steinitz allowed, too, not just that he “was gifted with most remarkable powers of originality, brilliancy and depth of combination [...] in the kingside attack”, but that in his most important encounters he also “showed some indications of the circumspective style which tends to hold the balance all over the board and seizes the slightest advantage at any point” (International Chess Magazine, May 1889).

Wilhelm Steinitz (1836-1900), the first official world champion and the subject of a fine "Move by Move" work by Craig Pritchett.

Life changes... even for ‘oldies’! In the next two or three decades, Steinitz changed his own game more radically than all of his peers and perhaps just as importantly gave expression to these momentous trends in chess not just in his many great games, but also in his incomparable writing, in The Field (1873-1882), International Chess Magazine (1885-1892), Modern Chess Instructor: Part 1 (1889) and elsewhere. Not just the world’s best player by acclaim (certainly through most, arguably all of the period, from around 1873 until the early 1890s), he was also a great teacher and, especially, chess innovator par excellence.

Contemporaries were certainly in awe of Steinitz’s remarkable facility for innovation. He pushed the boundaries of what most considered playable, at times, to extraordinary lengths. Among his greatest successes, to name but a few, must count:

1. His profoundly strategic reinterpretation of the long-neglected Salvio Gambit, which completely confounded Anderssen in their match, at London 1866, and his own, almost surreally conceived Steinitz Gambit, first unleashed on an unsuspecting world, at Dundee 1867.

2. Demonstrating the weak points in Anderssen’s favourite interpretation of Spanish: d3 Systems (generally involving an early Bxc6, followed by Nc3), and then subsequently refashioning the line (along myriad c2-c3 variants), which played an especially significant role in his world championship match victories against Zukertort (1886) and Chigorin (1889 and 1892).

3. Devising the first, recognisably modern anti-Isolated Queen’s Pawn defences, with which he repeatedly frustrated Zukertort’s attempts to attack (with White), in their 1886 match, and destroying Chigorin’s earliest attempts, in their 1889 match, at making his embryonic Chigorin Defence work, with a range of ideas that indicated an astonishingly accurate grasp of how to defuse such systems.

In addition to his profound chess understanding, it should also simply be stressed that Steinitz was a born fighter, who understood psychology and the value of calculated risk-taking and surprise in chess. Moreover he never lost his delight in combination or belief that tactics ultimately decide games. Far ahead of his time, Steinitz acted on the thoroughly modern principle that the scope in chess for innovation and test by concrete analysis was, in effect, near-endless. If he began to doubt any of his innovations, he would instantly ditch them.

It is scarcely possible to offer one game that provides more than the merest, limited insight into Steinitz’s great contribution to chess. Here, however, is one of my own personal favourites and one that is by any stretch of the imagination a combinational masterpiece. Any top 21st century player would be proud to play such a game, even today. It certainly takes us several other large steps from the Bourdonnais, Paulsen and Anderssen wins above to the very threshold of our own ‘modernity’.

Along with other past (as well as present) greats, Steinitz continues to inspire me. What do you think?

Main Sources – my own Everyman Chess books:

1. Heroes of Classical Chess (2009), especially the chapters on Rubinstein and Fischer;
2. Giants of Innovation (2011), especially the chapters on Steinitz and Lasker;
3. Great Chess Romantics (2013), especially the chapters on Anderssen and Chigorin;
4. Steinitz: Move by Move (2015).
5. And: Ignaz Kolisch: The Life and Chess Career, by Fabrizio Zavatarelli (McFarland & Company, 2015).

About the author IM Craig Pritchett (photo by Sally Pritchett) is a former Scottish champion and chess writer and retired Chartered Public Finance Accountant, who lives with his wife and two daughters in Dunbar, Scotland. Still an active national and senior international competitor, he narrates: "I knew long ago that I wouldn't be World Champion on that fateful day when Karpov took me out on board one at the 1974 Nice Olympiad, after I missed a winning line that, yes, was pointed out by Bobby Fischer and conveyed to the Scottish team by Tony Saidy a week or so later!" Craig was a longstanding chess correspondent for The Glasgow Herald (1972-2006) and has published ten chess books.

The above article appeared in the October 2016 of the British magazine CHESS

CHESS Magazine was established in 1935 by B.H. Wood who ran it for over fifty years. It is published each month by the London Chess Centre and is edited by IM Richard Palliser and Matt Read. The Executive Editor is Malcolm Pein, who organises the London Chess Classic.

CHESS is mailed to subscribers in over 50 countries. You can subscribe from Europe and Asia
at a specially discounted rate for first timers here, or from North America here.

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