Aaron Nimzowitsch

Aaron Nimzowitsch
Association	Russia Denmark
Born	7 November 1886 Riga
Died	March 16, 1935 Hareskov near Copenhagen
Best Elo rating	2780 (September 1929) ( Historic Elo rating )

Aaron Nimzowitsch , even Aron Nimzowitsch , Latvian Ārons Ņimcovičs (born October 26 ^{. Jul} / 7. November  1886 ^greg. In Riga ; † 16th March 1935 in Hareskov in Copenhagen ) was a in today's Latvia -born Danish-Russian chess master and theorist .

Name spelling

His parents had recorded the name Nêmçoviç ("the German") in their official documents . After a while it became the German spelling Niemzowitsch. When Aaron Niemzowitsch wanted to emigrate from the Baltic States to the west after the First World War , the authorities mistakenly omitted the letter "e" when the passport was issued, so that Niemzowitsch now became Nimzowitsch . In these uncertain times he failed to ask for a rectification. He would have run the risk of waiting a few more weeks for his passport or even losing it entirely.

Both spellings are used for the first name: Aaron and Aron (for example in his books and on his tombstone).

Life

youth

Nimzowitsch was the son of German-speaking Jewish parents. Little is known about his childhood and youth. In a Riga daily newspaper Andreas Ascharin published a game by the nine-year-old boy for the first time in 1896 (or 1895). The German weekly chess also published a Nimzowitsch game on p. 213 in 1904, with the remark that it “ gives brilliant testimony to the combinatory power of the leader of blacks”. According to his original intention, he did not come to Germany to play chess, but to study there. Jacques Mieses tells in his Nimzowitsch memoirs (Schach-Taschenbuch 1953, p. 37ff) that the same joke word was circulating about Nimzowitsch as a quarter of a century earlier about Curt von Bardeleben : "He studies chess and plays law." In fact, he studied philosophy in Berlin , but that has since become a matter of indifference, his teaching workshop was the Café Kaiserhof in Berlin and not the auditorium of the university.

From 1920 he lived in Copenhagen .

Chess career

From 1903, his name appeared regularly in the chess newspapers and should not disappear there for the next 30 years.

In addition to his changeable successes, he often had the tendency to make himself unpopular with his master colleagues due to his stubbornness. Later, after he had established his place in chess history, it was accepted with a shake of the head or with a smile, but in the early stages of his career this gave him some difficulties.

What is striking is the fact that he repeatedly withdrew from public tournament life and then sometimes only appeared again after several years with great success. This is partly due to the fact that, despite the strict abstinence from nicotine and alcohol, he was a rather sickly person who was exhausted by the grueling tournaments. On the other hand, however, it became apparent that his game methodology changed and his theories matured in these phases.

Nimzowitsch's chess compositions are predominantly methodologically well thought-out teaching examples for playing the game in middle and endgame . Up until 1919 he mainly published chess problems, later various studies became known in connection with his theoretical views .

The controversy with Tarrasch

The biographical starting point of the later theoretical dispute between Nimzowitsch and Siegbert Tarrasch is a free game played between the two in 1904 in Nuremberg . Nimzowitsch reports on this in detail in How I became a grandmaster . He writes:

“Even though I recognized at that time that Tarrasch was my adversary, I still didn't see him as my“ hereditary enemy ”. But our relationship should soon become very tense. It happened like that. About two months after the episode with "Th6" he considered me worthy of the honor of playing a serious game with me. I played the opening very strangely out of habit, partly because, as I mentioned above, at that time I found it very difficult to cope with positional play, but partly because even then I was consciously avoiding the well-trodden paths and only with a certain degree Skepticism based on the dogmas of the ruling school at the time. A large audience had gathered (although the game had a private character), because since the richness of my combinatorial imagination was wrongly equated with chess strength, the audience expected if not an even fight - because Tarrasch's reputation was in full bloom at the time - then at least an interesting and substantial game. After the 10th move Tarrasch crossed his arms in front of his chest and suddenly said the following sentence: "Never in my life have I been so much at a profit after the 10th move as in this case." By the way, the game ended in a draw . But for a long time I was unable to forgive Tarrasch for all the insults inflicted on me in front of the audience. [...] For me, Tarrasch was always mediocre; he played really very well, but all his views, sympathies and antipathies, and his greatest inability, namely not to create new ideas, - all this clearly demonstrated the mediocrity of his mental attitude. "

Aaron Nimzowitsch on the chessboard

This insult was a motivation for Nimzowitsch to replace Tarrasch as the leading theorist. From 1911 onwards, they repeatedly assured themselves of their antipathy, for example in game comments. So threw z. B. Tarrasch in 1912 suggested to Nimzowitsch, on the occasion of the game Rubinstein -Nimzowitsch (San Sebastian 1912), that he had “a pronounced preference for ugly opening moves” and assessed his play as “unaesthetic” overall. In the same year Nimzowitsch responded with an open letter to this “distorted criticism” and assumed that Tarrasch “wanted to take revenge for the theoretical fiasco in variant 3. e5”. He intensified the dispute that had been going on for years. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I was published in the Wiener Schachzeitung the twelve-page essay Meets Dr. Tarrasch's “The Modern Game of Chess” really modern conception? Then for a long time little was heard from Nimzowitsch. It was not until March 1923 that an article by Savielly Tartakower was found in the Neue Wiener Schachzeitung , in which Nimzowitsch's greatest concern was mentioned, the birth of “his system”.

The allegation, sometimes made, that the polemical tone adopted by Nimzowitsch and Tarrasch in their argument prevents the objective conclusion that the two parties were not as far apart as it appears and should be, is controversial. In particular, there is no evidence that Nimzowitsch wanted to emphasize the distance to Tarrasch for reasons of propaganda. Nimzowitsch had a strong personal aversion to Tarrasch until the end of his life, regardless of all chess differences.

As far as the chess differences are concerned, Nimzowitsch and Tarrasch differ fundamentally in the assessment of the space advantage and free piece play as well as the pawn structure. This can be seen, for example, in Tarrasch's aversion to somewhat reserved openings such as the Philidor defense and also to ancient Indian structures, and vice versa in Nimzowitsch's aversion to a "loose structure" in general and in particular to the Tarrasch defense of the Queen's Gambit, which he did due to structural defects - isolated farmer - found practically refuted.

For Nimzowitsch, the most important criterion for assessing the position was the pawn structure. Tarrasch, on the other hand, attached importance to development, space advantage and free play of figures, i.e. criteria that were only of secondary importance for Nimzowitsch. Nimzowitsch and Tarrasch (and almost all the other chess theorists) agreed that the central fields were privileged fields that had to be mastered. Nimzowitsch pointed out, however, that the center could also be controlled differently than by the peasant occupation propagated by Tarrasch, namely through the effect of figures. In practice he was able to demonstrate this thesis in Karlsbad as early as 1911, with White in an exemplary game against Hersz Salwe in the advance variant of the French defense. Nimzowitsch himself considered this to be "the first hyper-modern game in chess history".

Successes and early death

Nimzowitsch won the following chess tournaments : 1906 in Munich , 1913/14 the All-Russian Championship in Saint Petersburg (together with Alexander Alekhine ), 1922, 1923, 1924, 1928 (2 tournaments), 1933 and 1934 in Copenhagen , 1925 in Marienbad (together with Akiba Rubinstein ), 1926 in Dresden , 1926 in Hanover , 1927 in the Ostseebad Niendorf and in London , both together with Savielly Tartakower , another tournament in 1927 in London, 1928 in Berlin , 1929 in Karlsbad , 1930 in Frankfurt am Main and 1931 in Winterthur . In 1925 he was second behind Efim Bogoljubow at the German championship in Breslau .

At the chess tournament in Dresden in 1926, Alekhine and Nimzowitsch received 5,000 cigarettes as a beauty prize for their game. Nimzowitsch's best historical rating was 2780, which he achieved in 1929. As early as 1913, he was in second place in the subsequently calculated world rankings for six months.

From the beginning of the 1930s, his playing strength decreased. He showed himself for the last time at the Nordic Chess Congress in Copenhagen in 1934. Then it was unexpectedly reported that Nimzowitsch had died at the age of not yet 49 in the Hareskow Sanatorium in Copenhagen as a result of pneumonia .

Well-known games

• Samisch - Nimzowitsch, Copenhagen 1923 , the "immortal draft game "

Opening systems

Numerous opening variants bear his name, for example the Nimzo-Indian Defense and the Nimzowitsch Defense , which are still popular today .

Fonts

• The blockade. Bernhard Kagan, Berlin 1925.
• My system . A textbook of the game of chess on a completely new basis. Bernhard Kagan, Berlin 1925–1927.
• The practice of my system. A textbook of practical chess illustrates 109 games from my fights with numerous explanatory articles and preliminary discussions and 513 diagrams. Siedentop & Co., Berlin 1929.

literature

• Peter Anderberg: News on the Nimzowitsch-Tarrasch conflict. In: Kaissiber. Selected contributions to chess. 26, 2006, pp. 50-55. ISSN  0948-3217 .
• Peter Anderberg: Aaron Nimzowitsch and the Baltic newspaper. In: Kaissiber. Selected contributions to chess. 29, 2007, pp. 54-65. ISSN  0948-3217 .
• Johannes Fischer: Nimzowitsch vs. Tarrasch: Two dogmatists in dispute. In: KARL. The cultural chess magazine. 23rd vol., 3, 2006, pp. 32-37, ISSN  1438-9673 .
• Wolfgang Kamm: Siegbert Tarrasch. Life and work. Biography for the 70th birthday. Unterhaching 2004, ISBN 3-933105-06-4 .
• Raymond Keene : Aron Nimzowitsch, master of planning. Batsford, London 1999, ISBN 0-7134-8438-1 . (First edition 1974 under the title Aron Nimzowitsch: a reappraisal )
• Gero H. Marten: Aaron Nimzowitsch. A life for chess. Verlag Das Schacharchiv, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-88086-108-2 .
• Michael Negele: Swan song on the Limmat. In: KARL. The cultural chess magazine. 23rd vol., 3, 2006, pp. 38-43, ISSN  1438-9673 .
• Rudolf Reinhardt: Aaron Nimzowitsch 1928–1935. Games comments essays. Edition Marco, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-924833-61-9 .
• Per Skjoldager: Nimzowitsch in Denmark. In: KARL. The cultural chess magazine. 23rd vol., 3, 2006, pp. 24-30, ISSN  1438-9673 .
• Per Skjoldager, Jørn Erik Nielsen: Aron Nimzowitsch. On the road to chess mastery, 1886-1924 . McFarland, Jefferson 2012. ISBN 978-0-7864-6539-2 .

Web links

Commons : Aaron Nimzowitsch  - Collection of Images

• Aaron Nimzowitsch's books, essays & games
• Gravestone of Aaron Nimzowitsch
• Literature by and about Aaron Nimzowitsch in the catalog of the German National Library
• Peter Anderberg: 100 years ago: Munich 1906 - Nimzowitsch's first tournament victory
• Compositions by Aaron Nimzowitsch on the Schwalbe's PDB server

References and comments

1. ↑ Deutsches Wochenschach , No. 40, October 4, 1896, p. 373 ( Memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). According to Nimzowitsch, it was first published in 1895, see Edward Winter's note : Chess Notes , No. 5276 .
2. ↑ Johannes Fischer accidentally relocates the game to Coburg ( Nimzowitsch vs. Tarrasch: Zwei Dogmatiker im Streit , 2006, p. 32); see. Peter Anderberg: News on the Nimzowitsch-Tarrasch conflict , 2006, p. 50, footnote 3; see also: Discussion: Aaron Nimzowitsch , argument with Tarrasch.
3. ↑ Printed in the appendix of his book The Practice of My System . Schachzentrale Rattmann, Ludwigshafen 2006, ISBN 3-88086-074-2 , p. 353ff.
4. ↑ The game, commented on by Nimzowitsch, can also be found in How I became a grandmaster , pp. 365–369.
5. ↑ How I Became a Grandmaster , p. 355.
6. ↑ Wolfgang Kamm: Siegbert Tarrasch. Leben und Werk , p. 543, quoted from Johannes Fischer: Nimzowitsch vs. Tarrasch: Zwei Dogmatiker im Streit , 2006, p. 33.
7. ^ Chess tournament Niendorf
8. ↑ German individual chess championship 1925 in Breslau on TeleSchach (cross table and games)