Akiba Rubinstein

Akiba Rubinstein, around 1907
Association	Poland
Born	December 1, 1880 Stawiski
Died	March 15, 1961 Antwerp
title	Grand Master (1950)
Best Elo rating	2789 (June 1913) ( Historic Elo rating )

Akiba Kiwelowicz Rubinstein , own spelling of the first name Akiwa , (born December 1, 1880 in Stawiski , †  March 15, 1961 in Antwerp , Belgium ) was a Polish chess master. He was one of the world's strongest players in the 1910s and 1920s and was a contender for the world title held by the German Emanuel Lasker between 1894 and 1921 . Rubinstein was considered an endgame specialist and is the namesake of several opening variants of the chess game .

Life

Youth and chess in Łódź

Rubinstein was born as the youngest of fourteen children in a poor Jewish family in Mazovia, Poland , which was then part of the Russian Empire. Except for one sister, all of his siblings died of tuberculosis in childhood . Rubinstein was named after his father Akiba, who died a few weeks before Rubinstein was born. Rubinstein's mother, Raisel, married Rabbi Heller after her husband's death and moved the family to Białystok . Fearing that Rubinstein might contract tuberculosis like his siblings, he was not sent to the Talmudic School ( Yeshiva ). Rubinstein's stepbrother, Chaim Heller, of about the same age became a respected Torah researcher and, after his later emigration to the United States, a spiritual leader of Orthodox Judaism there .

Akiba Rubinstein spent his free time, which was increased due to school attendance, early on with the game of chess, which he played extensively in the restaurants near his parents' apartment. He learned the rules at the age of 14 during his visit to the cheder . After he had soon developed into the strongest player in town in Białystok, he was recommended to move to Łódź , about 300 kilometers south-west, which was then the metropolis of Polish chess life. In 1903 he finally moved to Łódź, where he played a large number of games with the local master Hersz Salwe and competed for supremacy in Polish chess. Salwe became Rubinstein's first teacher and friend. Both contested several competitions against each other. The first to qualify for the "All-Russian Championship Tournament" in 1903 ended in a 7-7 draw. Rubinstein won two more in the following years: 1904 just under 5.5: 4.5; In 1907 he won by a clear 16: 6.

The "All-Russian Master's Tournament" in 1903 in Kiev was Rubinstein's first chess tournament. He finished fifth. In 1905 he took part in the main tournament A of the International Chess Congress in Barmen and won his first international tournament participation, tied with the world-class player Oldřich Duras . He also caught the attention of world champion Emanuel Lasker , who was very positive about Rubinstein's deep game. With this tournament victory Rubinstein also received the championship title of the German Chess Federation .

Candidacy for the world championship title

The participants of the international Karlovy Vary championship tournament 1907 (Rubinstein sitting on the left)

In 1907 Rubinstein won the tournaments in Ostend , together with Ossip Bernstein , and the important international tournament in Karlsbad , half a point ahead of Géza Maróczy . There is an anecdote about a game in the Karlovy Vary tournament, which was reported by Hans Kmoch among others ( Chess Review 1950): Rubinstein led one round before the end of the tournament with one point ahead of Maróczy and had to compete against his Hungarian-Austrian compatriot Heinrich Wolf , who was on The evening before the game he assured me that he would teach the “Polish upstart” ( Heinrich Wolf : Quoted from John Donaldson, Nikolay Minev (1994)) a lesson. However, the next day Wolf offered a draw after 10 moves , which Rubinstein refused, even though it would certainly have won the tournament. A few moves later Rubinstein skipped the win and finally forced the draw by repeating the position . When asked why he hadn't accepted the draw offer straight away, Rubinstein replied: “With Wolf I will make a draw if I want, not if he wants!” ( Akiba Rubinstein : In: Kmoch, Reinfeld: Chess Review 1950, quoted in Schach , No. 5/1997, p. 48.)

About the turn of the year 1907/08 he also won the " 5th All-Russian Tournament " in Łódź, half a point ahead of Simon Alapin . On December 26th, 1907 Rubinstein succeeded against his compatriot Gersz Rotlewi in a remarkable sacrificial game, which Hans Kmoch later referred to as " Rubinstein's Immortal Game" based on the immortal game between Anderssen and Kieseritzky .

Between 1908 and 1910 he won competitions against Teichmann , Mieses , Marshall and Flamberg. With the exception of the undecided duel against Salwe, Rubinstein won all competitions of his chess career. A high point of his career was the 1909 tournament in Saint Petersburg , which Rubinstein won together with the reigning world chess champion Emanuel Lasker . Both scored 14.5 points from 18 games and distanced the next-placed players, Oldřich Duras and Rudolf Spielmann , by 3.5 points. In their direct encounter, Rubinstein won against the world champion and has been one of the candidates for the world championship throne since then. The finals from his games against Cohn , Lasker and Spielmann in Saint Petersburg became classic textbook examples.

In 1910 Rubinstein moved from Łódź to Warsaw, almost 40% of which was inhabited by Jews. The following year, at the tournament in San Sebastián, he met the young Cuban José Raúl Capablanca , who took part in a European chess tournament for the first time and ten years later was to take over the world title from Lasker. Capablanca won the tournament and Rubinstein followed in second place, but defeated the Cuban in one of only 36 defeats in his entire chess career. It was around this time that Rubinstein was first noticed by the public. Hans Kmoch witnessed a conversation that took place between Jacques Mieses and Rubinstein during a train ride. Rubinstein is said to have reported that he wanted to see a doctor as soon as possible because he was constantly plagued by a fly that settled on his head while playing.

The year 1912 was extremely successful for Rubinstein; beginning with the Warsaw City Championship played over the turn of the year 1911/12, he won a total of five tournaments, including San Sebastián, 0.5 points ahead of Aaron Nimzowitsch and Spielmann. In 1912 he was first together with Oldřich Duras at the 18th Congress of the German Chess Federation in Breslau. In June 1913 Rubinstein achieved his best historical Elo number with 2789 and was measured by that the best player in the world at the time. With Capablanca, Rubinstein was therefore one of Emanuel Lasker's potential challengers, but negotiations between both of them with the world champion failed, not least because of Lasker's high demands for prize money. All three opponents took part in the tournament in Saint Petersburg in the spring of 1914 . Lasker could not have eluded a world championship fight against the tournament winner. However, Rubinstein failed prematurely in this important tournament and did not reach any of the top five places for participation in the final tournament. Lasker eventually won ahead of Capablanca; a world championship fight, however, did not take place because of the beginning of the First World War .

War years and marriage

When Russia withdrew from Poland in the first years of the war, Rubinstein lost a large part of his fortune due to the devaluation of the ruble. From then on he suffered from his financial situation until the end of his life. Some of his acquaintances said in their memoirs that the cause of his severe depression - a progressive nervous disease that forced him to stop playing tournament chess in the early 1930s - was his experiences during the First World War. Grandmaster Grigori Löwenfisch contradicted this. In his autobiography he recalls the difficulties he had with Rubinstein during the tournament in St. Petersburg in 1914: “I helped the organizing committee with the accommodation of the participants. Rubinstein arrived a week before the start of the tournament and was assigned an excellent room in the 'European Hotel'. But just two days later he expressed dissatisfaction with his quarters: He was bothered by the noises of the elevator. One of the members of the organization then offered him a stay in his house, where Rubinstein could have any room. There were six to choose from, and the host was the only occupant of the house. Rubinstein drove there, but inconvenience emerged again: the silence of the house depressed him. He was brought back to the hotel. I realized: Akiba's nervous system was broken. Even later this did not do him any good. "

In March 1917 Rubinstein married Eugenie Lew, eleven years his junior, in Szczuczyn - a village not far from his hometown, to which he had moved in the meantime - who gave birth to their son Jonas a year after the wedding. After the end of the war Rubinstein was still one of the world's best players, but he, who moved further and further away from the people, was soon overtaken by the younger generation of players around José Raúl Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine and Efim Bogoljubow . In 1919 he moved with his young family from Poland to Gothenburg, Sweden.

In 1921 Rubinstein finished in the tournament of The Hague behind Alekhine and Savielly Tartakower in third place, where he lost his games against both. The Dutch chess player Evert Jan Straat, who met Rubinstein after the The Hague tournament in Amsterdam, reports of a collapse of Rubinstein when he asked him about the tournament and his defeat against Alekhine, he “shouted [...] in the middle of Amsterdam's Leidenstrasse: ' But I'm the greatest strategist, I'm the greatest strategist in the world! ' and hit his chest violently ”. From then on, anecdotes and reports “with allusions about Rubinstein's melancholy, his silence, despair and the feeling of having failed and being superfluous”, suggesting that Rubinstein's health was impaired, increased. In the same year, Capablanca captured the world title of Emanuel Lasker in Havana. Rubinstein did not have the financial means to help determine the negotiations for the prize money of a world championship fight; a three-way battle for the title that he proposed was rejected by the organizers in Cuba. From then on Rubinstein no longer had the opportunity to raise the prize money for a later World Cup fight.

Bogolyubov (left) and Rubinstein at the Moscow tournament in 1925

The new world champion Capablanca, who had ended the 27-year reign of Emanuel Lasker in 1921, won the 1922 tournament in London. Rubinstein, who moved to Germany near Potsdam that same year, came fourth behind Alekhine and Milan Vidmar . A second place in a smaller round-robin tournament in Hastings , again behind Alekhine, was followed by Rubinstein's triumph for a long time at the following tournament in Vienna: He won without losing a game in front of Tartakower, Wolf, Alekhine and Maróczy. He defeated Alekhine in just 26 moves and retaliated for his two previous defeats in London and Hastings. In the following years there were no great successes, after poor performances in Karlsbad in 1923 (12th place) and Mährisch-Ostrau in 1923 (10th place) he came second in Baden-Baden in 1925, and in Marienbad in 1925 he won together with Nimzowitsch. In third place behind Bogoljubow and Nimzowitsch Rubinstein came in the German championship in 1925 in Breslau .

In 1926 Rubinstein moved with his family to Belgium, where his second son Samy was born in 1927. Rubinstein continued to take an active part in chess life in his native Poland. He won the championship of Poland in 1927 and took part in chess Olympiads for his old homeland : In Hamburg 1930 he played on the first board of the Polish team, in which Tartakower played, and led them to the gold medal. Rubinstein achieved the best individual result of all participants with 15 points from 17 games on the first board.

End of the career

From February to May 1931 Rubinstein traveled to Poland and Palestine and gave simultaneous performances there . At the 1931 Chess Olympiad , which was held in Prague in July, Rubinstein played again on the top board for Poland and won the silver medal with his team.

Rubinstein played his last chess tournament in December 1931: in Rotterdam he, Tartakower, Colle and Landau competed against each other in three double rounds. Rubinstein finished last with two points and eventually retired from chess. From 1930 the Rubinsteins lived in a small house, later in a rented apartment in Brussels . His wife Eugenie ran a kosher restaurant on the first floor of the apartment building . The family's material situation was inadequate. In 1932 the Wiener Schachzeitung published a call for donations for Rubinstein. According to his sons, their father's mental health deteriorated. So he watched them silently playing chess and left the room without saying a word if the game was incorrect. During the Second World War , Belgium was occupied by the Germans who started persecuting the Jews. Rubinstein's wife had him admitted to a private mental hospital in early 1942, where he stayed until 1944 and escaped the deportation of the Jews from Belgium that began in August 1942 . His wife and two sons survived, hidden by friends, in and around Brussels.

Even after his retirement from tournament chess, Rubinstein had apparently retained a high level of skill. Friendship games against Miguel Najdorf , Albéric O'Kelly de Galway and Daniel Abraham Yanofsky , which were played and recorded after the Second World War, prove this. In 1946 he gave a simultaneous performance on 30 boards in the Liège chess club, won 24 and lost 2 games in 4 draws .

In 1950 Rubinstein was among the first players to be awarded the title of International Grand Master by the World Chess Federation FIDE .

After the death of his wife in 1954, he spent the rest of his life in an old people's home in Brussels. When this had to be temporarily closed for renovation work, the residents were temporarily relocated to Antwerp. Akiba Kiwelowicz Rubinstein died there on March 15, 1961. He was buried next to his wife Eugenie in the cemetery in the Brussels suburb of Etterbeek .

Reception and appreciation

Rubinstein was an excellent positional player and was particularly considered a master of the endgame . He also made significant contributions to the theory of openings . In honor of Rubinstein, a chess tournament has been held annually in the Polish spa town of Polanica-Zdrój (Bad Altheide) since 1963 , the Rubinstein Memorial .

Endgame technique

Cohn - Rubinstein
St. Petersburg, 1909

	a	b	c	d	e	f	G	H
8th									8th
7th									7th
6th									6th
5									5
4th									4th
3									3
2									2
1									1
	a	b	c	d	e	f	G	H

Diagram 1: Position after 25. Kd2xc1

Cohn - Rubinstein
St. Petersburg, 1909

	a	b	c	d	e	f	G	H
8th									8th
7th									7th
6th									6th
5									5
4th									4th
3									3
2									2
1									1
	a	b	c	d	e	f	G	H

Diagram 2: Position after 35. e3 – e4

Some of his final games have found their way into the textbooks, such as his pawn ending against Erich Cohn , played in the 1909 tournament in Saint Petersburg. In this Rubinstein was able to defeat the world champion Lasker in a precisely guided rook ending.

Cohn laid out his game with the white pieces very peacefully and exchanged all pieces in the hope of a quick draw ; with the last exchange of the remaining towers on move 24, however, he made the decisive mistake. Rubinstein assessed the pawn endgame better than his opponent, because White suffers from square and pawn weaknesses on the kingside due to his double pawn (see diagram 1). The black king penetrates through the black squares, starting with 25.… Ke7 – f6, after h3, after which White has to protect the pawn h2 with his king and can only wait. After 10 more moves the second position in the diagram was reached. Black subsequently dissolves the pawns on the kingside by exchanging them. He freed Although Weiss of the weak pawn on h2, but it creates a next weakness on e4, which he conquer because of its active stationed King and the resulting free farmers will realize victorious bringing e5. It followed (see diagram 2):

35 ... f5xe4

36. f3xe4 h5-h4

37. Kh1-g1 g4-g3

38. h2xg3 h4xg3

and Cohn gave up the game. Rubinstein will approach the e4 pawn via the g3 square.

Opening theory

Various opening variants are named after Rubinstein, for example the Rubinstein variants of the Nimzowitsch-Indian defense , the English symmetry variant or the Spanish four knuckers game .

The Merano system of the semi-Slavic defense was named under the impression of Rubinstein 's game played against Ernst Grünfeld in Merano in 1924 and examined in more detail in terms of opening theory.

The Rubinstein system in the French defense (1. e2 – e4 e7 – e6 2. d2 – d4 d7 – d5 3. Nb1 – c3 d5xe4 ) has been named after him since the 1907 tournament in Karlovy Vary, where he used it in his game against Maróczy applied it for the first time in this sequence. With the inserted moves 3.… Ng8 – f6 4. Bc1 – g5 Rubinstein played “his system” d5xe4 for the first time in 1903 in Kiev against Emanuel Schiffers .

Influence on other chess masters

Richard Réti wrote that Rubinstein was the chess player who put the teachings of Wilhelm Steinitz into practice most perfectly. In contrast to his contemporaries Siegbert Tarrasch and Aaron Nimzowitsch , Rubinstein did not write any textbooks. Garry Kasparov said that this is why Rubinstein's contribution to the development of modern chess has long been underestimated. Tigran Petrosjan , chess world champion from 1963 to 1969, got to know the games of Nimzowitsch and Capablanca as a child. He did not study Rubinstein's games until the end of the 1950s, when he was already one of the world's best, and came to the realization that no one had had such a profound positional style like that before.

Boris Gelfand wrote about Rubinstein that, unlike many other players of his time, he was not primarily looking for tactical ideas in the opening, but aimed for harmonious pawn structures and tried to develop a game plan that extended into the endgame. His game against isolated farmers was particularly effective .

The Romanian grandmaster Mihail Marin describes in his book Learn form the legends: Chess champions at their best (2006), in which he analyzes several outstanding endgame achievements of Rubinstein, the Rubinstein biography of Yuri Rasuwajew as his "chess bible", which he during of his military service almost continuously.

Fiction

The figure of the chess master Avrom Rozental in Ronan Bennett's novel Zugzwang (2007) is modeled on Akiba Rubinstein. The fictional story takes place in Saint Petersburg at the time of the international chess tournament of 1914, at which the world champion Lasker's challenger will be decided. The names of the other participants in the historic tournament were retained in the novel; in Bennett's first draft the chess master was still called Rubinstein. The author finally changed the name, as he attributed different characteristics to Avrom Rozental compared to the historical person Rubinstein.

literature

• John Donaldson, Nikolay Minev: Akiba Rubinstein. Uncrowned King . ICP, Seattle, WA 1994, ISBN 1-879479-27-3 . (English)
• John Donaldson, Nikolay Minev: Akiba Rubinstein. The Later Years . ICP, Seattle, WA 1995, ISBN 1-879479-26-5 . (English)
• Viktor Glatman: Akiba Rubinstein's chess academy . Fizkultura i Sport , Moscow 1992.
• Garry Kasparov : On My Great Predecessors , Part I. Everyman Chess 2003
• Garry Kasparov: On My Great Predecessors , Part III. Everyman Chess 2004
• Hans Kmoch : Rubinstein wins! 100 brilliant games of the great chess artist . ( Tschaturanga ; Vol. 14) Olms, Hildesheim 1983, ISBN 3-283-00084-0 . (Repr. Of the Vienna 1933 edition)
• Krzystof Pytel: Akiba Rubinstein, czyli o sztuce rozgrywania końcówek . IWZ, Warsaw 1987, ISBN 83-202-0507-7 . (Polish)
• Yuri Rasuwajew , Valeri Murachweri: Akiba Rubinstein . Moscow 1980. (Russian)
• Ernst Strouhal: Rubinstein's Defense. On the life of the chess master Rubinstein . In: Menorah. Yearbook for German-Jewish History 7. 1996, pp. 221–249.
• Hans Wenz: Akiba Rubinstein. A life for chess . Joachim Beyer Verlag , Eltmann 2014, ISBN 978-3-940417-69-5 . (First edition De Gruyter, Berlin 1966)

Web links

Commons : Akiba Rubinstein  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Akiba Rubinstein in the catalog of the German National Library
• Frank Große: Akiva [sic] Rubinstein (1882–1961)
• Replayable chess games by Akiba Rubinstein on chessgames.com (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Karl's title page . 3/13
2. ↑ This date is written on his tombstone and is confirmed by a marriage certificate from 1920, which is preserved in the Białystok State Archives. See Rubinstein's DOB , Ken Whyld Foundation & Association for the Bibliography and History of Chess, April 19, 2014. Jeremy Gaige: Chess Personalia . Jefferson 1987, p. 364 and John Donaldson / Nikolay Minev: Akiba Rubinstein: uncrowned king . Seattle 1994, p. 4 named October 12, 1882 as the date of birth. This date, based on information in the St. Petersburg 1906 tournament book, was long considered the most probable. Other sources cited December 12, 1882 as the date of birth, e.g. B. Hans Kmoch: Rubinstein wins . Vienna 1933, p. 4 and Hans Wenz: Akiba Rubinstein, a life for chess . Berlin 1966, p. 9.
3. ↑ Some sources give twelve children
4. ↑ HARAV HAGAON R. CHAIM HELLER ZT ”L1880-1960
5. ^ Donaldson & Minev (1995), pp. 290 ff.
6. ^ Donaldson & Minev (1995), p. 292.
7. ↑ Wiener Schachzeitung 1926, No. 11, pp. 164–165.
8. ↑ Kmoch (1933, reprint 1983).
9. ↑ Strouhal (1996), p. 235.
10. ^ The international tournament in Breslau 1912 (18th DSB Congress) on TeleSchess (cross table and all games)
11. ↑ The development of Rubinstein's historical Elo rating (English)
12. ↑ Grigori Löwenfisch: Isbrannyje partii i wospominanija (Selected games and memories) . Moscow 1967, p. 46.
13. ^ Evert Jan Straat in his book Praatschak , Den Haag 1956, p. 118, quoted from Strouhal (1996), p. 241.
14. ↑ Strouhal (1996), p. 241.
15. ↑ German individual chess championship 1925 in Breslau on TeleSchach (cross table and games)
16. ↑ 3rd Chess Olympiad, Hamburg 1930: Best Board Results ( English ) OlimpBase. Retrieved November 12, 2013.
17. ↑ Strouhal (1996), p. 245.
18. ↑ Willy Iclicki: FIDE Golden book 1924-2002 . Euroadria, Slovenia, 2002, p. 74.
19. ^ Edward Winter: Chess Notes, Item 5744
20. ↑ The game of Cohn - Rubinstein for replay at chessgames.com (Java applet)
21. ↑ Edward Winter on the origin and inconsistencies in the naming of the Merano variant
22. ↑ Kasparov: On My Great Predecessors . Part III, p. 33.
23. ↑ Boris Gelfand: My Rubinstein . In: Akiba Rubinstein's chess academy . Moscow 1992, pp. 13-18.
24. ↑ Mihail Marin: Learn form the legends: Chess champions at their best . Göteborg 2006, p. 11.
25. ^ Ronan Bennett at the Lasker Society in Berlin on the occasion of a novel reading.

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on November 20, 2013 .