Chess tournament in Saint Petersburg 1914

The participants of the winning group of the tournament (from left to right): Lasker (sitting), Alekhine, Capablanca, Marshall (standing) and Tarrasch (sitting)

The Organizing Committee: Pyotr Petrovich Saburov, Yuliy Osipovich Sossnitskij, Pyotr Alexandrovich Saburov , and Boris Evgenevich Malyutin (from left to right)

The 1914 chess tournament in Saint Petersburg is considered to be one of the most important international chess tournaments. It was won by the reigning world champion Emanuel Lasker after a sometimes spectacular course . According to unofficial statistics, this event was the fifth most popular tournament to date; To date (as of July 2019) it is 13th in the ranking.

circumstances

It was organized on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the St. Petersburg Chess Club and between April 8th ^jul. / April 21st ^greg. and May 9th ^jul. / May 22nd ^greg. played out in its premises. The president of the four-member organizing committee was Pyotr Petrovich Saburov.

Apart from the winner of the all-Russian championship tournament in 1913/1914 (since this ended in a dead race between Alexander Alekhine and Aaron Niemzowitsch , both players were admitted), only players who had won at least one international championship tournament were invited. Amos Burn , Richard Teichmann , Szymon Winawer , Oldřich Duras , Géza Maróczy , Miksa Weiß and Carl Schlechter canceled the invited players . Ultimately, eleven top-class players took part, in addition to Alekhine and Niemzowitsch, these were Emanuel Lasker , Siegbert Tarrasch (both German Empire ), Dawid Janowski ( France ), Frank Marshall ( United States ), José Raúl Capablanca ( Cuba ), Ossip Bernstein , Akiba Rubinstein ( both Russian Empire), Joseph Henry Blackburne and Isidor Gunsberg (both United Kingdom ).

The admission criterion was criticized by Georg Marco in the Wiener Schachzeitung ; He pointed out that, on the one hand, players were allowed who had passed their zenith years earlier (Blackburne and Gunsberg had their greatest successes in the 1880s), while on the other hand, recognized masters such as Rudolf Spielmann and Savielly Tartakower were excluded.

In retrospect, the constellation of participants is remarkable in that with Lasker, Capablanca and Alekhine three current and future world champions and Gunsberg, Tarrasch, Marshall and Janowski four former world championship challengers were represented. Lasker had held the title since 1894 and has defended it five times since then. Since the end of 1910, however, he had not contested an international tournament and in 1911 also rejected a challenge from Capablanca. For this reason, the meeting in Saint Petersburg in 1914 was also seen as the unofficial World Cup.

The game was played in the afternoon and evening hours. The participants had two hours to think about the first 30 moves, 90 minutes for the next 22 and one hour per 15 moves for the rest of the game. Draws before move 45 were not permitted (apart from stalemates and triple repetitions ). All of them received generous allowances and Lasker also received a 4,500 ruble entry bonus. His rival and compatriot, Siegbert Tarrasch, who was also competing, wrote in the tournament book after the competition that this amount was not too high given the performance shown by Lasker. The audience income amounted to around 6,000 rubles, a record-breaking sum for the time.

course

The prelude to the two-part tournament was a classic round-robin tournament (officially referred to as a general tournament ) in which each player competed once against each other. Capablanca showed chess at the highest level and clearly led the final ranking. The top five qualified for the second round. The early departure of Akiba Rubinstein , who only achieved 7th place, caused a stir. At the end of the preliminary round, the Saint Petersburg celebrities gathered for a festive banquet , at which Sergei Prokofiev gave a piano recital.

Preliminary round, classic round-robin tournament

	player	1	2	3	4th	5	6th	7th	8th	9	10	11	Points
1	José Raúl Capablanca		½	½	1	½	1	½	1	1	1	1	8th
2	Emanuel Lasker	½		½	½	½	0	1	½	1	1	1	6½
3	Siegbert Tarrasch	½	½		½	½	1	½	1	1	0	1	6½
4th	Alexander Alekhine	0	½	½		1	½	1	½	½	½	1	6th
5	Frank Marshall	½	½	½	0		1	½	½	1	1	½	6th
6th	Ossip Bernstein	0	1	0	½	0		½	½	½	1	1	5
7th	Akiba Rubinstein	½	0	½	0	½	½		½	½	1	1	5
8th	Aaron Nimzowitsch	0	½	0	½	½	½	½		0	½	1	4th
9	Joseph Henry Blackburne	0	0	0	½	0	½	½	1		0	1	3½
10	Dawid Janowski	0	0	1	½	0	0	0	½	1		½	3½
11	Isidor Gunsberg	0	0	0	0	½	0	0	0	0	½		1

	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

Position after 7. Nxd4, second final game Lasker – Capablanca

In the second part of the tournament (officially known as the winning group ) the five best-placed players competed against each other again in double-rounds - that is, each played two games against each of the four others. The previous points were taken over, so the 25-year-old Capablanca was the clear favorite. In fact, thanks to very energetic play, Lasker, who was 20 years older, was able to prevail. In the first half of the final, he was only able to fend off a defeat against Capablanca and achieve a draw. A victory for the Cuban at this point would have almost decided the tournament. Lasker caught up half a point in the further course; in the meantime Capablanca led with eleven points ahead of Lasker with ten, Alekhine with 8½, Marshall with seven and Tarrasch with 6½ points.

In the 18th round, the German won with White the second - now famous - game against Capablanca with an exchange variant of the Spanish game by exchanging queens in the sixth move ( 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4 Bxc6 dxc6 5. d4 exd4 6. Qxd4 Qxd4 7. Nxd4 ) and then defeated him in the endgame . Luděk Pachman noted that Lasker's opening pick was a stroke of genius as the Cuban tried to keep the game simple with the aim of a draw. Black was now forced to play actively in order to utilize his advantage from the pair of bishops and to take advantage of White's better pawn structure . However, Capablanca continued to deliberately avoid complications and played too passively for Lasker to beat him.

In the following game the visibly troubled Capablanca lost to Tarrasch with White. This enabled Lasker to overtake him in the ranking and ultimately to win the tournament by half a point. In the double round tournament, the world champion scored an extraordinarily high seven points from eight games (+6 = 2 −0) with a view to the competition, remained undefeated and, despite all the critics, had impressively underpinned his status as the world's best player.

Final, double round tournament

	player	1	2	3	4th	5	Points	Prize money in R
1	Emanuel Lasker		½ 1	1 1	1 ½	1 1	13½	1200
2	José Raúl Capablanca	½ 0		½ 1	1 0	1 1	13	800
3	Alexander Alekhine	0 0	½ 0		1 1	1 ½	10	500
4th	Siegbert Tarrasch	0 ½	0 1	0 0		0 ½	8½	300
5	Frank Marshall	0 0	0 0	0 ½	1 ½		8th	250

In addition to the normal prize money, the arbitration tribunal consisting of Amos Burn , Eugène Znosko-Borovsky and SJ Pollner awarded three beauty prizes to the following players:

Award winners	Sum in R	reason	comment
José Raúl Capablanca	125	Victory over Ossip Bernstein
Siegbert Tarrasch	75	Victory over Aaron Nimzowitsch
Joseph Henry Blackburne	50	Victory over Aaron Nimzowitsch	Special price

In addition, a prize of 100 rubles was offered for the best result against the winners, which was shared equally between Akiba Rubinstein , Dawid Janowski , Aaron Nimzowitsch and Ossip Bernstein .

Consequences and further events

Before and during the Saint Petersburg tournament, it was widely assumed that the participating Akiba Rubinstein, as one of the world's strongest players and potential contender for the world title, would soon challenge Lasker. However, after his disappointing performance in the first round, negotiations about a world championship match failed.

Instead, Emanuel Lasker remained world champion for a good seven years without further defense before he gave up in the competition with José Raúl Capablanca in 1921 after disappointing performances and the title was passed to the Cuban. In 1927 Capablanca lost the world championship against Alexander Alekhine, who has now been naturalized in France . This talking to a two-year hiatus ( 1935 - 1937 , Max Euwe ) until his death in 1946 - of the interregnum result was - at the top of the international chess world.

literature

• Siegbert Tarrasch : The Grand Master's Tournament in St. Petersburg in 1914. Collection of all the games with detailed notes . 2nd Edition. H. Hedewigs Nachf., Leipzig 1921.
• The grand international masters' chess tournament at St. Petersburg, 1914; the whole of the games, with notes, both original & compiled from various sources . McKay, Philadelphia 1914. Digitized by HathiTrust

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Formulas , found on chessmetrics.com . Retrieved November 21, 2013.
2. ^ Pachman, Luděk: Pachman's Decisive Games . Pitman Publishing, London 1975, ISBN 978-0-679-13063-5 , p. 65.

Web links

• Wiener Schachzeitung 1914, pages 80ff. in ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online