Munich 1900

The twelfth DSB Congress produced one of the great deadlocks of nineteenth-century chess. After fifteen rounds three masters stood level on 12/15 — Géza Maróczy, Harry Nelson Pillsbury and Carl Schlechter — and the play-off called to separate them settled nothing at all. For Schlechter in particular, Munich was the making of a great player.

◇Three masters, level at the top

Held in Munich as the 12th Congress of the Deutscher Schachbund, this single round-robin of sixteen players ran through the high summer of 1900. Amos Burn and Georg Marco led the chase, but by the closing rounds three men had pulled clear of the field: the Hungarian Géza Maróczy, the American Harry Nelson Pillsbury, and the Austrian Carl Schlechter.

Pillsbury led for much of the tournament and looked the likeliest winner, but slowed at the finish. In one late round his opponent Alexander Halprin, reportedly shown a key line by Maróczy, held him to a quick draw; in the last round Pillsbury could not break the stubborn defence of the veteran Johann Berger. Maróczy and Schlechter won to catch him, and all three finished on 12/15, a point and a half ahead of Burn.

◇The play-off that decided nothing

A three-way play-off was arranged among the winners, and it produced no winner. Maróczy blundered badly in his game against Pillsbury and withdrew from the match. Pillsbury and Schlechter then exchanged a win apiece and drew their remaining games, so their mini-match finished level.

Unwilling to play on, the winners settled the honours by agreement: Pillsbury took the 1,000-mark first prize, while Schlechter received the second prize of 800 marks together with a silver-gilt goblet donated by the Prince Regent of Bavaria. Both men were declared victors of the congress, leaving the three-way tie for first standing in the record.

“The turning point was Munich 1900, when Schlechter took shared first place with Pillsbury and Maróczy and then tied his playoff match with Pillsbury.”

“Munich was his best chance.”

◇A turning point — and a first for chess governance

Munich marked a shift for Schlechter, long dismissed as the "Viennese drawing master." Instead of steering safe positions to peace, he began squeezing small advantages to the full — the tenacity that would carry him, a decade later, to within a game of the world title. For Pillsbury, dominant on the international circuit for years after Hastings 1895, Munich was his best chance at another clear first prize; he never managed one.

The congress also left a footnote in chess history off the board. On its final day, at the initiative of Amos Burn, delegates founded the International Chess Masters' Association — an early, short-lived attempt at an international governing body, and a distant precursor of FIDE.