Baden-Baden 1925

◈Germany returns to the board

Baden-Baden 1925 was the first major international tournament staged in Germany after the First World War, organised in large part by Siegbert Tarrasch in an effort to revive German chess. Twenty-one players met at the Kurhaus for a single round-robin of twenty rounds — 210 games in all — with Johannes Metger presiding as arbiter.

It was an extraordinary field. Alongside Alekhine and Rubinstein came Efim Bogoljubow, Frank Marshall, Aron Nimzowitsch, Savielly Tartakower, Richard Réti, and the young Mexican Carlos Torre Repetto, whose European début here launched a brief but luminous legend. Tarrasch himself, once world-championship material, finished near the foot of the table — a melancholy signal of how far his own powers had declined.

◈Alekhine at his peak

By 1925 Alekhine had emerged as the clear challenger to Capablanca's crown, and at Baden-Baden he put an exclamation mark on that claim. He set a torrid pace that Rubinstein — the epitome of the classical school — could hold to within a point and a half but never quite match, finishing on 16/20 to Rubinstein's 14½. Friedrich Sämisch took third with 13½, the result of his career, ahead of Bogoljubow.

The manner of the win, as much as the margin, made the impression. Savielly Tartakower, contrasting Alekhine's play with the reigning and former champions, gave the tournament its most famous verdict — a line that placed Alekhine's Baden-Baden result in a class of its own.

◈Réti's Immortal

The tournament produced one of the enduring masterpieces of chess literature. In Richard Réti's game against Bogoljubow — later christened Réti's Immortal — the hypermodern leader built a slow, flank-based bind and finished with a cascade of sacrifices, a game reproduced in anthologies ever since as a showcase of the new school's ideas. Baden-Baden thus became both the stage for Alekhine's triumph and a monument to the hypermovement that was reshaping how chess was played.