Wednesday, January 8, 2020

1922 Game of the Year


   The year 1922 was a big one for radio. In February, President Warren G. Harding installed the first radio in the White House and in June he was the first president to be heard live on radio when he dedicated the Francis Scott Key Memorial over the Baltimore radio station WEAR. Also in February the world's first symphony concert broadcast was made by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on station WWJ and New York University played a radio chess match with Princeton. It was the first intercollegiate radio chess match of its kind. 
     In March, Variety magazine’s front-page headline was: Radio Sweeping Country - 1,000,000 Sets in Use. Come May of 1922 Illustrated World ran an article called “Playing Games by Radio” that mentioned how you could test your skill with an opponent miles away using the radiophone or the spark transmitter with dots and dashes. 

   A spark transmitter was a type of radio transmitter that generated radio waves by means of an electric spark. They were the first type of radio transmitters and were the main type used during the wireless telegraphy or the "spark" era, the first three decades of radio, from 1887 to the end of World War One.
     A woman in New York, Rosalind Kendall, playing chess with a friend in Chicago using a two way radio link provided by a Jersey City radio station, published in a 1922 radio magazine. Miss Kendall spoke into the cone-shaped horn attached to the transmitter's carbon microphone and listened to her friend's reply in the earphones. 

     The photo's caption read, "Beth Weber, Chicago, discovered a radio way to play chess with her chum, Miss Rosalind Kendall (above) of New York. Rosalind uses a Jersey City transmitting station to talk back to her friend" 
    On June 7, 1922, E. T. Gundlaen, a passenger on the steamship President Taft in the Atlantic Ocean played a game by radio against Edward Lasker at the Chicago Chess Club. It was billed as the world’s first radio chess match between land and sea and was won by Lasker in 24 moves. 
     In March 1922 a candidate match was supposed to take place between Alexander Alekhine and Akiba Rubinstein with winner to be recognized by Capablanca as the official challenger to a world championship match, but the match never took place. 
     Two well known players were lost in 1922. Theodor von Scheve (1851- April 19, 1922), the German master and writer died in Germany at the age of 70. On May 1, 1922, Fernando Saavedra (1847-1922) died in Dublin, Ireland. He was author of a famous endgame study. Saavedra Position
     In 1922 Emanuel Lasker, in a 28-page booklet titled Mein Wettkampf mit Capablanca (My Match with Capablanca), stated that he believed chess would soon be exhausted and that draws would kill chess. 
     In August the 15th British Chess Federation Congress (known as the London victory tournament) was won by Capablanca. This was the first event after World War I that Alekhine and Capablanca played against each other. 
     The participants signed the London Agreement which were the regulations for world championship matches, first proposed by Capablanca. The signers included Alekhine, Capablanca, Bogoljubow, Maroczy, Reti, Rubinstenin, Tartakower and Vidmar. Clause one stated that the match was to be six games up with draws not counting. 
     Emanuel Lasker wasn’t invited to London due to his politics during World War I. Not many know that Lasker was a huge supporter of Germany’s entry into World War I as were many German intellectuals and the educated elite of the day. 
     Immediately after Germany started the war Lasker wrote a series of distinctly pro-war articles in the Fall of 1914. In one he stated “the goal of occupation and administration of France by Germans is as sure as mate by rook and king against king.”  

     In England, Henry W. Butler (1858-1935), a leading official of the Brighton Chess Club and a friend of Lasker’s until the article appeared, was so angered that he destroyed a large portrait of Lasker by jumping through it with both feet. It was Butler who had organized Lasker’s King’s Gambit match against Chigorin in 1903. 
     In October, ten-year old Samuel Reshevsky played in the New York Master tournament and finished in a tie for 3rd-6th (1 win, 2 draws, 2 losses). He defeated Janowski and won the brilliancy prize for the game. It was also in October that Reshevsky, who did not attend school, got into trouble with child welfare officials during a late night simultaneous exhibition for charity when police raided the place. His parents were charged with improper guardianship and Reshevsky himself complained to a judge that America wasn’t a free country as advertised in Poland if they were going to interfere with his chess. In November, the case was dismissed when it was demonstrated that he was receiving religious education at a rabbinical school, but the court designated a sponsor outside the Reshevsky family to report to the court periodically on his behalf. 
     In September of 1922, the organizers of the Hastings chess congress decided to hold a masters tournament which would pit two English masters against four of the best from Europe. Alekhine edged Rubinstein in the final round when he won the following famous game against Bogoljubow. Rubinstein fail to keep pace even though he struggled for over a hundred moves, but could only draw against Sir George Thomas. 

 1) Alekhine 7.5-2.5 
2) Rubinstein 7.0-3.0 
3-4) Thomas and Bogoljubow 4.5-5.5 
5) Tarrasch 4.0-6.0 
6) Yates 2.5-7.5 

     In this game Alekhine gave up three queens to beat Bogoljubow. As Kasparov pointed out, Alekhine’s amazing combinations didn’t appear out of thin air; they were the fruit of very deep strategic preparation. Reti asserts that this game illustrated the hypermodern school's emphasis on positional play in opposition to the routine play of the classical style that was set down by Tarrasch and Steinitz.

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