Emanuel Lasker

◇The cantor's son from the Neumark

Emanuel Lasker was born on Christmas Eve 1868 in Berlinchen, a small town in the Prussian Neumark, the son of a Jewish cantor. At eleven he was sent to Berlin to study mathematics, and there his elder brother Berthold — himself a strong master — taught him the game. The boy proved an immediate menace: short of money for his studies, he supported himself by playing for stakes in the cafés of Berlin, learning chess not as a science but as a livelihood and a fight.

In July 1889 he won the minor tournament of the German Chess Association's congress at Breslau after a tie-match with Feyerfeil, which under German rules made him a master. J. G. Cunningham's 1894 sketch of him in The Games in the Steinitz–Lasker Championship Match lists what followed: first in the British Chess Association tournament of 1892, first and unbeaten that year in a quintangular tournament against Bird, Blackburne, Gunsberg and Mason, match wins over Blackburne (+6 =4) and Bird (+5), and, after he went to the United States in September 1892, every one of his thirteen games at New York in 1893. By 1894, still only twenty-five, he had cleared a path to the one man who stood above all others — the first World Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz.

◇Toppling the old king

The articles for the 1894 match were signed at the Manhattan Chess Club in New York on 3 March: stakes of $2,000 a side, fifteen moves an hour, and victory to the first player to win ten games, draws not counting. Play began in New York on 15 March, moved to the Franklin Chess Club in Philadelphia in April, and finished at Montreal's Cosmopolitan Club on 26 May. Cunningham describes the Montreal crowds: the Montreal Star reproduced the games move for move on a board in its office window, two policemen were at times needed to keep people moving, and when an officer asked one spectator to move, “‘It's your move,’ replied the enthusiast, without removing his eyes from the board.” Lasker won convincingly, 12–7 (+10 −5 =4), and at twenty-five became the second World Chess Champion. In his summary of the match, Cunningham wrote that Steinitz himself had pronounced Lasker “the finest living end-game player.” When sceptics murmured that Steinitz had simply grown old, Lasker answered them in the 1896–97 rematch at Moscow, crushing the founder of modern chess theory by an even wider margin.

Across the same decade he proved he was no mere match-player. He won the great quadrangular tournament at St Petersburg in 1895–96, took first at Nuremberg in 1896 ahead of the world's elite, and then produced two of the most dominant tournament performances ever recorded — London 1899, where he scored 23½ of 28 and finished a colossal margin clear of the field, and Paris 1900 with 14½ of 16. For a few years the gap between Lasker and everyone else looked unbridgeable.

◇The longest reign

Lasker defended his title rarely but emphatically. Frank Marshall, the brilliant American attacker, failed to win even a single game in 1907 (+8 −0 =7). Siegbert Tarrasch, the great theoretician who believed chess obeyed laws Lasker seemed to flout, went down +8 −3 =5 in 1908. David Janowski was swept aside. Only Carl Schlechter, in 1910, came within a whisker — the match finished level at 5–5, and Lasker kept his crown by the narrowest possible thread.

His final masterpiece as champion came at St Petersburg in 1914. Trailing the young José Raúl Capablanca by a point before their second meeting in the final group, Lasker beat the Cuban in their individual game and overhauled him to win the tournament outright — a result so admired that, by a story long attached to it, the visiting Tsar conferred the title of grandmaster on the five finalists.

The First World War froze the chess world, and when peace returned Lasker was past fifty. In 1921, in the heat of Havana, Capablanca finally took the crown; Lasker, unwell, resigned the match without winning a game. Yet he was far from finished. At New York 1924, aged fifty-five, he won the strongest tournament of the era ahead of both Capablanca and Alekhine, scoring thirteen wins, six draws and one loss — to Capablanca. And at Moscow 1935, sixty-six years old and called out of retirement, he finished undefeated in third place — a performance hailed at the time as a biological miracle.

◇The fighter and the psychologist

Lasker's contemporaries struggled to define his strength. Richard Réti famously claimed that Lasker deliberately played inferior moves to lure opponents onto ground where the human mind, not the position, would decide the game. For half a century that became the legend: Lasker the psychologist, who won by reading men rather than positions.

Modern analysts see it differently. Writers such as Andrew Soltis and Vladimir Kramnik have shown that Lasker's apparently strange choices were usually the most resilient and resourceful moves on the board: he was willing to accept dynamic imbalances and defend with iron precision in ways the dogmatic chess of his day didn't understand. To Lasker, the game was Kampf, struggle, the title he gave one of his books and his whole idea of competition. He believed a slight disadvantage made a player more alert and inventive, and he showed it in a thousand hard-fought games. As Tarrasch, who never quite worked him out, admitted: Lasker occasionally loses a game, but he never loses his head.

◇A teacher who demanded proof

In the preface to Common Sense in Chess, Lasker explained that the book grew from twelve lectures he gave to London chess players in spring 1895. He chose relatively few games and positions, asking readers to work through them rather than merely read them. Even plausible rules deserved scepticism and exacting proofs. His later Manual of Chess made the same demand: pupils should think for themselves and repeatedly test their principles and evaluations against the facts.

That ambition extended beyond chess. In the January 1907 preface to Struggle, Lasker described an effort to express the strategic rules of chess in terms broad enough to apply to other contests in nature. The board offered a particularly clear laboratory: checkmate settled the outcome, and the game's tested theory made it a teacher of strategy. Chess was the starting point for his philosophy of struggle.

In his philosophical book Das Begreifen der Welt (1913), Lasker named the planned science of struggle “Kampftheorie” or “Machologie”. There he only stated its problem, left its development to a second volume, and named Kampf and Struggle, written in 1906, as its forerunners. He also used chess to show how knowledge advances: because a given checkmate settles a question beyond doubt, and because the possibilities in chess are very large but finite, he argued that generations of players, each building on the theory of the last, would one day solve the game, a process he expected to take some thousands of years.

◇The mathematician, the philosopher, the exile

Chess was only one of Lasker's lives. In 1902 he took a doctorate in mathematics at Erlangen, and in 1905 published work on the primary decomposition of ideals that Emmy Noether would later generalise into the Lasker–Noether theorem, foundational to abstract algebra and algebraic geometry. He wrote philosophy, befriended Albert Einstein — who called him one of the most interesting people I came to know in my later years — and became one of Europe's strongest Go players, as well as an expert at bridge. He invented his own game, Lasca. In Brettspiele der Völker, he recalled combining English draughts with a Russian variant, simplifying the board and testing the game repeatedly before introducing it to the public. His Lasker's Manual of Chess remains one of the deepest books ever written on the game.

His Russian editor Ilya Mayzelis remembered a visit to Lasker at Moscow's Hotel National before the 1925 tournament. Nikolai Grigoriev showed him an unpublished pawn study. Lasker found its first four moves, went astray on the fifth, then asked to see the rest. On grasping the solution, he rose, shook Grigoriev's hand and kissed him. Mayzelis recorded the scene in his afterword to How Viktor Became a Chess Master: the veteran champion could still greet another player's invention with sudden delight.

His last years were shaped by catastrophe. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Lasker and his wife Martha, both Jewish, were driven from Germany and stripped of their property. They fled first to England, then to the Soviet Union, where Lasker renounced his German citizenship, was given a post at Moscow's mathematics institute and trained the Soviet team. In 1937 the couple emigrated to the United States. He died in New York in January 1941 — penniless, but unbroken, the longest-reigning champion the game has ever known.