Harry Nelson Pillsbury won Hastings in 1895, at twenty-two, ahead of Lasker, Chigorin, Steinitz and the other leading masters. He became known for attacking play, particularly in the Queen’s Gambit, and for his large blindfold exhibitions. In 1897 he won the United States championship from Jackson Showalter and held it until his death. Illness shortened his career; he died at thirty-three without playing a World Championship match.
A New England boy and the game
Harry Nelson Pillsbury was born on 5 December 1872 in Somerville, Massachusetts. He came to chess comparatively late and learned it with frightening speed: within two years of taking the game seriously he was beating established experts, and in April 1892, not yet twenty, he won a match against the reigning World Champion Wilhelm Steinitz — who, it is true, had given him the odds of a pawn, but who did not give such odds to fools.
Boston's strong chess clubs sharpened him. He played the open, attacking style of the new generation, with a particular taste for the Queen's Gambit, and he had two gifts that set him apart from any contemporary: a prodigious memory and the capacity to calculate several complicated positions at once. Few outside America had heard of him when, in 1895, he sailed to England to test himself against the world.
Hastings, 1895
The Hastings tournament of 1895 brought together reigning World Champion Emanuel Lasker, former champion Wilhelm Steinitz, Siegbert Tarrasch, Mikhail Chigorin, Isidor Gunsberg and the other leading masters. Pillsbury, twenty-two and making his first appearance in a major international tournament, finished ahead of them all.
His win over Tarrasch became one of the best-known games of the event, and his handling of the Queen’s Gambit helped popularise the opening. Winning the tournament brought him international recognition.
“I have a poor memory for everything but chess.”
“Pillsbury gave a marvellous performance, winning 13 of the 16 blindfold games, drawing two, and losing only one.”
“The ultra-talented American would have clearly become the No.1 challenger, and Lasker would possibly have had to play an official match with him for the world championship, under conditions highly unfavourable for him ...”
“Pillsbury’s achievement had a stunning effect on me, as it did on the entire chess world.”
“The effect of Pillsbury’s displays was immediate. They electrified me, and with the consent of my parents I began to visit the Havana Chess Club.”
The shadow over St Petersburg
On the strength of Hastings, Pillsbury was invited to the great six-round quadrangular at St Petersburg in 1895–96 against Lasker, Steinitz and Chigorin — effectively a contest to decide who would challenge for the world title. He led the field after the first half with 6½ points from 9, playing the best chess of his life.
He scored only 1½ from his last nine games and finished third. In My Great Predecessors, Part I (2003), before Game 41, Garry Kasparov singles out his fourth meeting with Lasker, on 4 January 1896, as a missed opportunity: victory in that game would have made Pillsbury the leading challenger and might have brought a title match. Kasparov frames the match as a possibility, rather than an agreement; Lasker won the game. Pillsbury’s failing health subsequently shortened his career.
The blindfold marvel
Pillsbury conducted large simultaneous exhibitions without seeing the boards. Kasparov records a twenty-two-board display in Moscow in 1902: seventeen wins, four draws and one loss. Nine-year-old Alexander Alekhine watched it and later recalled its effect on him (My Great Predecessors, Part I, after Game 42). Pillsbury also played twenty-one blindfold games at Hannover that year against entrants in the Hauptturnier.
His memory seemed to have no floor. Shown a long list of unfamiliar and tongue-twisting words, he would recite it back forwards and backwards — and then repeat the feat, perfectly, the following day. Edward Lasker, who watched him, never forgot it. For audiences of the 1890s and 1900s, Pillsbury's mind was as much the spectacle as his chess.
Pillsbury’s Havana exhibition in 1899 also made an impression on the young Capablanca. In “The Cuban Morphy” in My Great Predecessors, Part I, Kasparov quotes Capablanca recalling how the display encouraged him to visit the Havana Chess Club with his parents’ consent.
Champion in the long decline
Even as his health failed, Pillsbury remained a force. In 1897 he beat Jackson Showalter to take the United States Chess Championship, a title he would hold without interruption until his death. He kept travelling, kept playing, kept attacking — Munich, Vienna, Monte Carlo, Hannover — wringing brilliant games out of a body that was betraying him.
His finest late hour came at Cambridge Springs in 1904, where he met Emanuel Lasker again. The two men had been bound together by rivalry since Hastings; across their careers they finished level, five wins each. At Cambridge Springs, Pillsbury produced one of the great attacking games of his life and beat the world champion in a Queen's Gambit — a flash of the old wizardry from a man with two years to live. The disease would not be denied much longer. His health broke down completely, and on 17 June 1906 Harry Pillsbury died in Philadelphia, thirty-three years old.
Legacy
Pillsbury died on June 17, 1906 in Philadelphia, his mind and body destroyed by syphilis, aged thirty-three. He had held the United States championship without a break from 1897 until his death and never lost it at the board. He is remembered less for titles, since he never got to play for the one that mattered, than for the amazement of those who saw him: the man who won Hastings on his first appearance among the masters, who could play twenty blindfold games at once and recite a stranger's word list backward the next morning, and who pioneered the Queen's Gambit attacks that still bear his mark. Garry Kasparov considered a title match a possible consequence of a different result in Pillsbury’s fourth game with Lasker at Saint Petersburg. Chess remembers him as the Wizard of Hastings, one of its brightest talents and saddest losses.
Books
Books Harry Pillsbury wrote, co-wrote, edited, or contributed to. Translations and reprints are grouped under the same work.
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The Hastings Chess Tournament, 1895
Contributor — game annotations