Bad Pistyan 1912

In the Hungarian spa town of Pistyan, Akiba Rubinstein produced one of the most dominant performances of his career, scoring fourteen points from seventeen games and finishing two and a half points clear of the entire field. It was one leg of an extraordinary run — four international tournament victories inside a single year — that moved Emanuel Lasker to call him one of the very greatest masters.

◇A supertournament at the spa

Pistyan — Bad Pistyan to its German-speaking guests, Piešťany today — was a fashionable thermal-spring resort in the Kingdom of Hungary, and in the spring of 1912 its Grand Hotel Royal hosted one of the strongest tournaments of the year. Eighteen masters contested a full single round-robin of seventeen rounds, 153 games in all.

The field was deep: alongside Rubinstein came Rudolf Spielmann, Frank Marshall, Oldřich Duras, Richard Teichmann and Carl Schlechter, the 19-year-old Gyula Breyer, plus Simon Alapin, Georg Salwe, Károly Sterk, Zoltán Balla and others. It was the second stop on a tour that carried Rubinstein from San Sebastián to Pistyan, on to the German Congress at Breslau, and finally to the All-Russian Masters at Vilnius.

◇Rubinstein at his peak

Rubinstein simply ran away with it. He won twelve games, drew four, and lost only once — to Spielmann, the man who would finish a distant second — reaching 14/17 and taking first prize by a full two and a half points. Even two quick draws at the very end did nothing to threaten a lead that had never been in doubt.

The victory belonged to the greatest year of Rubinstein's life. Winning four major international events in one calendar year was a feat that stood as a record for decades, and Pistyan was among the most emphatic of the four. Lasker's verdict — that Rubinstein now stood among the very greatest masters — reflected a player widely regarded as the strongest in the world never to play for the title.

“One of the very greatest masters.”

◇Behind the champion

Spielmann's 11½ was good enough to clear second on his own, with Marshall a full point back on 10½ and a cluster of Duras, Teichmann and Schlechter sharing fourth on 10. Zoltán Balla made his mark with wins over Teichmann and Alapin, and Moishe Lowcki took a brilliancy prize for his game against Duras.

For all the talent below him, the tournament was remembered as Rubinstein's — a display of technique and control that his contemporaries struggled to answer.