Ostend 1907 (Championship)

Ostend 1907 ran as two events at once: a vast masters' tournament and, beside it, a small Championship Tournament reserved for six of the game's elite, who met four times over each other's boards across twenty gruelling games. Siegbert Tarrasch won it by half a point — and the organisers crowned him World Champion Tournament Player.

◇Two tournaments by the sea

The Belgian resort of Ostend, already a fashionable spa on the North Sea, staged its great chess festival of 1907 inside the Kursaal casino. It was really two contests. Alongside a large masters' tournament — some thirty players, eventually shared at the top by Ossip Bernstein and Akiba Rubinstein — the organisers set apart an elite Championship Tournament for six of the world's leading masters, a private duel among the game's aristocracy.

The Championship used an unusually punishing format: a quadruple round-robin in which each of the six faced every rival four times, twice with White and twice with Black, for twenty games apiece and sixty in all. Emanuel Lasker and Géza Maróczy were invited but declined, and their places went to the veterans Amos Burn and Mikhail Chigorin, who joined Tarrasch, Carl Schlechter, Dawid Janowski, and Frank Marshall.

◇Tarrasch prevails

Over four exhausting weeks Tarrasch edged home first on 12½ from 20 (+8 =9 −3), a single half-point ahead of Schlechter on 12. Janowski and Marshall shared third and fourth on 11½, Burn trailed on 8, and the ageing Chigorin — playing near the end of his career — finished last with 4½.

For his victory the organisers proclaimed Tarrasch "World Champion Tournament Player," a title that captured his standing as the strongest tournament competitor of the day short of Lasker himself.

◇The road to Lasker

The win sharpened Tarrasch's long-standing claim to be Lasker's natural challenger, a claim he had pressed for years. In 1908 the two finally met for the world championship — and Lasker settled the argument on the board, winning convincingly by +8 −3 =5.

For Chigorin the Championship was one of his last appearances among the elite; the great Russian romantic died in January 1908, closing the era he had helped define.