Ernst Grünfeld

◇A boyhood in poverty

Ernst Franz Grünfeld was born in 1893 in the Josefstadt district of Vienna, the capital of an empire then near its height. His own beginnings were far humbler: he grew up in poverty, and an accident in early childhood cost him a leg. None of it kept him from the chessboard. He discovered the game young, and in chess the poor Viennese boy found the one arena where method, memory and patience counted for more than circumstance.

He rose without a patron and without fanfare, the slow and sound way. Before he was twenty he was already contributing articles on the Ruy Lopez to the Wiener Schachzeitung, the leading German-language chess journal of the day — the first sign of the scholar he would become, and of a mind that preferred to understand a position thoroughly rather than merely to dazzle with it.

◇The man who would not err in the opening

Grünfeld modelled his chess on Akiba Rubinstein — the supreme classical technician — and built his whole game on soundness. He played 1.d4 almost to the exclusion of all else, steered clear of wild complications, and was content, again and again, to draw a correctly played game rather than gamble on a sharper continuation. Critics found him cautious, even dull; his admirers understood that the caution was the point.

Grünfeld claimed that he did not make mistakes in the opening. In a report from Carlsbad in 1929, Alekhine described him as “that well-known explorer of chess variations E. Grünfeld of Vienna.” Kasparov reproduces the passage in My Great Predecessors, Part I, in a discussion of Alekhine's writing about competing schools of chess.

◇The Grünfeld Defence

In April 1922, at the great tournament of Bad Pistyan, Grünfeld unveiled the idea that would carry his name into history. In the seventh round he met Friedrich Sämisch with a defence that calmly invited White to build a broad pawn centre — and then set about undermining it from the flanks. The game was drawn in twenty-two moves, but the concept was born. Later that same year, in Vienna, he employed the new defence to defeat no less a player than Alexander Alekhine, soon to be world champion.

The Grünfeld Defense was quietly revolutionary: a hypermodern answer to 1.d4 that gives up the center on purpose and counts on counterplay against it. Its inventor, typically, played it only now and then. Others took it up. It is now a mainstay of elite chess, played over the decades by Vasily Smyslov, Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov and the strongest players of today, and in their hands it became far more combative than in Grünfeld's careful ones.

◇The encyclopedist of Vienna

If Grünfeld's tournament results made him respected, his scholarship made him singular. Over more than forty years he wrote on opening theory for journals across Germany, Belgium and the Soviet Union; because his work was mostly chess notation, it crossed borders and languages with ease. Bulgaria was a steady customer — and, in the hard years, paid him for his articles in food rather than money. His books, among them The Queen's Pawn Game and the Queen's Gambit Declined (1924) and the Taschenbuch der Eröffnungen im Schach (1953), distilled a vast accumulated knowledge.

Garry Kasparov gives a concrete example of that scholarship in My Great Predecessors, Part II. Annotating Botvinnik's win over Tal in the eleventh game of their 1961 world championship return match, he points out that a stronger continuation in the Exchange Slav had been known since Grünfeld's Taschenbuch. The handbook's analysis remained a reference for a position played at the highest level years after its publication.

Above all there was the library. Grünfeld gathered chess material on an almost obsessive scale, until the collection filled the living room of his small Viennese flat. He was, in the phrase his contemporaries reached for, a walking encyclopedia of the openings — a man who seemed to hold the whole evolving map of theory in his memory, and who kept the rest meticulously catalogued on his shelves. In an era before databases, he was the database.

◇The tournaments and the long twilight

Grünfeld's playing record in the 1920s was that of a genuine international force. He won at Vienna (1920 and 1927), Margate (1923), the German Chess Federation congress at Frankfurt (1923), Merano (1924) and Budapest (1926), and at his peak around 1924 he stood among the very strongest players in the world. He represented Austria at four Chess Olympiads — 1927, 1931, 1933 and 1935 — and his finest showing came in London in 1927, where he scored an unbeaten 9½ out of 13, with six wins and seven draws. Kasparov records that total in My Great Predecessors, Part II, and OlimpBase's individual results confirm it.

When FIDE created its official grandmaster title in 1950, Grünfeld was among the first to receive it, recognition of a career spent in the front rank. By then he was spending more time with his beloved library than at the board. His last tournament was Beverwijk 1961, where, aged sixty-seven, he still beat the young Dutch master Jan Hein Donner. He died in Vienna the following spring.