Wilhelm Steinitz

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Wilhelm Steinitz
Image:Wilhelm Steinitz2.jpg
Full nameWilhelm Steinitz
CountryImage:Flag of Austria.svg Austria
Image:Flag of the United States.svg United States
BornMay 17, 1836
Prague
Died August 12, 1900 (Aged 64)
New York, United States
World Champion 1886-1894

Wilhelm (later William) Steinitz (May 17, 1836, Prague – August 12, 1900, New York, USA) was an Austrian-American chess player and the first official world chess champion. Known for his original contributions to chess strategy such as his ideas on positional play, Steinitz, along with Paul Morphy, is considered by many chess commentators to be the founder of modern chess.[1]

Contents

[edit] Life and chess career

Steinitz was born in the Jewish ghetto of Prague (today Czech Republic, then Austrian Empire), the last in a family of thirteen sons. His father was a hardware retailer. He learned to play chess at age 12. Leaving Prague to study mathematics in Vienna, he began playing serious chess in his twenties.[2]

In 1861 he won a major tournament in Vienna, whereby he was sent to represent Austria in the London tournament of 1862. He placed sixth, but Adolf Anderssen, the winner of the event, expressed positive comments on the quality of his play. After winning a match with the Italian player Serafino Dubois, who placed 5th in the tournament, Steinitz decided to turn professional and to start a chess career, taking residence in London.
In 1866, Steinitz won a match in London against Adolf Anderssen (8–6), establishing himself as the best active chess player in the world.[3]. A minority of chess writers date Steinitz as becoming World Chess Champion from that date;[4] there is no evidence that he claimed the title for himself at the time, although he later claimed to have been the champion since his win over Anderssen.[5] It has been suggested that Steinitz could not make such a claim while Paul Morphy was alive.[6] (Morphy had defeated Anderssen by a far wider margin, 8–3, in 1858, but retired from chess soon after. Morphy died in 1884).
His results in the following years were very good: 2nd at Baden-Baden 1870, 1st at London 1872, 1st at Vienna 1873, =1st at Vienna 1882. In match-play he defeated Joseph Henry Blackburne by large margins in 1872 (+7 −0 =1) and again in 1876 (+7 −0 =0), and crushed Johannes Zukertort (+7 −1 =4; and Zukertort had claimed the world number 2 position in 1871 by beating Anderssen convincingly).[7] Steinitz was also a good blindfold player: in Dundee 1867 he played six simultaneous blindfold games with the result of three wins and three draws.

Barely five feet in height, and handicapped by lameness (as a precursor to arthritis) and later by arthritis, Steinitz had a sharp tongue and violent temper.[8] As a result of this, his relations with the London chess community became difficult, so in 1883 he decided to leave England and moved to New York, where he lived for the rest of his life.

In 1886, Steinitz played the World Chess Championship 1886 match against Johannes Zukertort, generally considered to have been the first official World Chess Championship. It was played in various U.S. cities (New York, Saint Louis, New Orleans). After the first five games played in New York, Zukertort led the match 4-1, but in the end Steinitz won decisively with the score 12.5–7.5. Though not yet officially an American citizen, Steinitz wanted the U.S. flag to be placed next to him (he became a U.S. citizen on November 23 1888, having resided for five years in New York, and changed his first name from Wilhelm to William).

Image:Lasker-Steinitz.jpg
Emanuel Lasker (right) playing Steinitz for the World Chess Championship, New York 1894

Steinitz successfully defended his title in 1889 against the Russian Mikhail Chigorin, in 1891 against Isidor Gunsberg (Hungarian-born with British citizenship) and again in 1892 against Chigorin. He lost the world title in 1894 to Emanuel Lasker (the match was played in New York, Philadelphia and Montreal), then also lost a rematch in Moscow 1896.

After losing the title, Steinitz took part in many tournaments: he won at New York 1894 and was fifth at Hastings 1895 (winning the first brilliancy-prize for his game with Curt von Bardeleben); at Saint Petersburg 1895, a four-players round-robin event with Lasker, Chigorin and Pillsbury, he took a very good second place. Later his results began to decline: 6th at Nuremberg 1896, 5th at Cologne 1898, 10th at London 1899.

Some authors claim that he contracted syphilis,[9] so that this may have been a cause of the mental breakdowns he suffered in his last years. His chess activities had not yielded any great financial rewards, and he died a pauper in the Manhattan State Hospital (Ward island) of a heart attack on August 12 1900. Steinitz is buried in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn, New York.

Lasker, who took the championship from Steinitz, wrote, "I who vanquished him must see to it that his great achievement, his theories should find justice, and I must avenge the wrongs he suffered."[10] Steinitz's fate, and Lasker's keenness to avoid a similar situation of financial ruin, have been cited among the reasons Lasker fought so hard to keep the world championship title.

[edit] Contributions to Chess

Image:Steinitz1866.jpg
Steinitz 1866

Steinitz began to play professional chess at the age of 26 in England. His play at this time was no different than that of his contemporaries: sharp, aggressive, and full of sacrificial play. This was the style in which he became "world number one" by beating Adolf Anderssen in 1866 and confirmed his position by convincingly beating Zukertort in 1872 and winning the 1872 London International tournament (Zukertort had claimed the rank of number 2 by beating Anderssen in 1871).

In 1873, however, his play suddenly changed. He gave immense attention to what we now call the positional elements in chess: pawn structure, space, outposts for knights, etc. This new approach paid off very quickly as it helped Steinitz to a convincing win in a top-class 1873 tournament in Vienna, where he won his last sixteen games in a row. Although Steinitz often accepted unnecessarily difficult defensive positions in order to demonstrate the superiority of his theories, he also showed that his methods could provide a platform for crushing attacks.[4][7]

When he fought for the first World Championship in 1886 against Johannes Zukertort, it became evident that Steinitz was playing on another level. Although Zukertort was at least Steinitz' equal in spectacular attacking, Steinitz often out-maneuvered him fairly simply.[4] Steinitz' results in the first part of the match were poor because he sometimes failed to exploit his positional advantages properly (for example in the third game), but he gradually eliminated such mistakes and finished with a solid victory (+10 -5 =5).

Despite changing his style to develop and demonstrate his new approach to chess strategy, Steinitz retained his capacity for brilliant attacks right to the end of his career. For example in the 1895 Hastings tournament (when he was 59) he beat von Bardeleben in a spectacular game in which at one point Steinitz deliberately exposed all his pieces to attack simultaneously (except his king, of course).[4]

He wrote extensively on the game, and in 1885 he founded in New York the "International Chess Magazine" of which he was the chief editor. In 1889 he edited the book of the great New York 1889 tournament (won by Chigorin and Weiss), at which he did not participate.

Steinitz adopted a scientific approach to his study of the game, formulating his theories in scientific terms and "laws". In Max Euwe's words: "Steinitz is the father of the systematic positional way of playing. The point of departure of Steinitz' theory is: make a plan according to the characteristics of the position. Consequently, Steinitz aimed at positions with clear-cut features, to which his theory was best applicable".[11] Vladmir Kramnik emphasizes Steinitz' importance as a pioneer in the field of chess theory: "Steinitz was the first to realise that chess, despite being a complicated game, obeys some common principles. ... I can't say he was the founder of a chess theory. He was an experimenter and pointed out that chess obeys laws that should be considered."[12]


[edit] Notable games

Image:Wilhelm Steinitz.jpg
Wilhelm Steinitz

[edit] Miscellaneous

  • Steinitz expressed the opinion that the reason Jews do so well at chess is because of their patience, pure breeding, and good nature.[13]
  • Steinitz is featured on a stamp.[14][15]

[edit] Publications

Please help improve this article or section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (August 2007)
  • International Chess Magazine, 1885-91
    • A Literary Steinitz Gambit
  • The Modern Chess Instructor, 1889
  • The Games of Wilhelm Steinitz, ed. Pickard & Son 1995. A collection of 1,022 Steinitz' games with annotations.
  • Steinitz, primo campione del mondo, Jakov Nejstadt, ed. Prisma 2000. (Italian)
  • From Steinitz to Fischer, ed. Sahovski Informator, Belgrade 1976.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ See, e.g., Emanuel Lasker, Lasker's Manual of Chess, 2d ed., David McKay Co., New York, 1947, p. 187.
  2. ^ Harold C. Schoenberg, Grandmasters of Chess, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, Rev. Ed. 1981, p. 99.
  3. ^ Harold C. Schoenberg, Grandmasters of Chess, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, Rev. Ed. 1981, p. 96.
  4. ^ a b c d Fine, R. (1952). The World's Great Chess Games. Andre Deutsch (now as paperback from Dover). 
  5. ^ Winter, E.. Early Uses of ‘World Chess Champion’.
  6. ^ "The Centenary Match, Kasparov-Karpov III", Raymond Keene and David Goodman 1986, p. 1–2
  7. ^ a b Silman, J.. Wilhelm Steinitz. Jeremy Silman. Several examples of Steinitz testing his theories in top-class play.
  8. ^ Harold C. Schoenberg, Grandmasters of Chess, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, Rev. Ed. 1981, p. 96.
  9. ^ http://www.chesscafe.com/text/kmoch06.txt Grandmasters I Have Known - Emanuel Lasker], by Hans Kmoch, ChessCafe.com (see last sentence)
  10. ^ Ibid.
  11. ^ "From Steinitz to Fischer" by Max Euwe, page XI
  12. ^ Kramnik, V.. Kramnik Interview: From Steinitz to Kasparov. Vladmir Kramnik.
  13. ^ Dr. Hermann Adler and Steinitz, the Chess Amateur (September 1911; p. 367; referenced by chess historian Edward G. Winter in "Chess and the Jews" (2003). (See also Hermann Adler)
  14. ^ Berkovich, Felix (2000), Jewish Chess Masters on Stamps, McFarland & Company, ISBN 978-0786406838
  15. ^ Jewish Chess Masters On Stamps book review by John Donaldson at jerrysilman.com

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Preceded by
(unofficial) 		World Chess Champion
1886–1894 		Succeeded by
Emanuel Lasker

v • d • e
World Chess Champions
Undisputed World ChampionsSteinitz • Lasker • Capablanca • Alekhine • Euwe • Botvinnik • Smyslov • Tal • Petrosian • Spassky • Fischer • Karpov • Kasparov • Kramnik • Anand
FIDE World ChampionsKhalifman • Anand • Ponomariov • Kasimdzhanov • Topalov


Persondata
NAME Steinitz, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Steinitz, William
SHORT DESCRIPTION first official world chess champion
DATE OF BIRTH May 17, 1836
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague, Austrian Empire
DATE OF DEATH August 12, 1900
PLACE OF DEATH New York, United States
br:Wilhelm Steinitz

bg:Вилхелм Щайниц cs:Wilhelm Steinitz da:Wilhelm Steinitz de:Wilhelm Steinitz el:Βίλελμ Στάινιτς es:Wilhelm Steinitz fr:Wilhelm Steinitz it:Wilhelm Steinitz he:וילהלם שטייניץ lv:Vilhelms Šteinics mk:Вилхелм Штајниц nl:Wilhelm Steinitz ja:ヴィルヘルム・シュタイニッツ no:Wilhelm Steinitz pl:Wilhelm Steinitz pt:Wilhelm Steinitz ro:Wilhelm Steinitz ru:Стейниц, Вильгельм sk:Wilhelm Steinitz sl:Wilhelm Steinitz sr:Вилхелм Штајниц sv:Wilhelm Steinitz tr:Wilhelm Steinitz uk:Штейніц Вільгельм

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