In the May 1937 issue of Deutsche Schachzeitung, Hannak published an article by Theodor Gerbec of Austria (1887 - 1946) titled Is This Progress? in which, in rather heated terms, Gerbec assailed the style of the young GMs of the day.
Gerbec was an interesting fellow, to say the least. He was also a co-editor of the Deutsche Schachzeitung and he had his ideas on Aryan vs. Jewish chess. Gerbec was also anti-American and found the Jewish American GM Reuben Fine a handy target. He also had a strong dislike for Salo Flohr who later emigrated to the Soviet Union, but at the time was still living in Czechoslovakia.
Gerbec wrote, "Pure safety chess is pretty much the worst thing that has ever been played on the 64 squares." Chess as played by those two was unnatural and and Gerbec knew where it came from. "It seems that this style comes from America. It's the same sober, boring style that builds the tasteless skyscrapers and mechanizes the whole life and, what is the main thing, brings success. The same compulsion that forces American life into the path of speculation. But speculative chess is the last thing we need and it will never be progress."
Hannak called the claim preposterous and wondered if Gerbec had seen any of Fine’s and Flohr’s games; thye were they main object of Gerbec’s disdain. Reinfeld described Gerbec as “a German writer whose mediocre understanding of the game prevented him from liking a game unless it was full of bing-bang-biff combinations.”
In the article Gerbec reproached the modern style for its poverty of ideas and claimed the young players had a style that was “completely lacking in any spirit of initiative...all they do is wait and wait until their opponent loses patience, makes a slight strategical mistake and then they are slowly crushed with mathematical certainty.”
Gerbec claimed the outstanding representative of this tendency was Salo Flohr. He observed that Flohr had at his disposal an enormously developed technique and acknowledged that occasionally “we find combinations in Flohr's games...but these are of a purely technical nature and not to be confused with the combinations of a Marshall, a Spielmann or an Alekhine.”
Gerbec found it even more depressing that recently there had appeared another representative of this system who was “even duller than Flohr.” That was Reuben Fine who, according to Gerbec, didn’t strive for an advantage...but played a waiting game from the very first move.
Also among Gerbec’s complaints was the fact that Flohr never opened a tournament game with any other move other than 1.d4 or 1.c4. And Fine, he claimed, was even more cautious: he played only 1.c4 and then 2.Nf3 and only then 3.d4. According to Gerbec, Fine did this “else his opponent might adopt the enterprising Budapest Defense or the Albin Counter Gambit.” He added that “this style signifies nothing more than the Americanization of chess, the sterile mechanical spirit of which the skyscraper is the ultimate manifestation.”
Hannak was critical of the article and probably correctly claimed that “it would be a waste of time to attempt to convince Herr Gerbec that he is wrong” and Reinfeld agreed.
The year also saw the tragic story of Dr. Robert. B. Griffith (August 19, 1876 – May 30, 1937) who was a former University of Pennsylvania Chess Champion and a noted player, having at one time won games against, among others, Emanuel Lasker and Pillsbury.
Dr. Griffith retired from chess for a period of twenty years or so while establishing a practice in Hollywood where he was the personal physician to Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin; he also performed plastic surgery.
At one time an actor named William H. Scott sued Dr. Griffith for $100,000, or about $1.8 million today. Scott claimed Dr. Griffith had operated on his nose and had mangled it to such an extent that he was no longer able to get film work. A judge ruled that there was no evidence of negligence on the part of Dr. Griffith.
In another case, Dorothy Higgins, a New York stage player, filed suit for $5,000 ($90,000 today) against Dr.Griffith alleging an operation he performed on her nose to make it photograph well caused it to increase in size and made her voice sound like she had a cold.
Then Minnie Chaplin, wife of film star Syd Chaplin, claimed she came from under Dr. Griffith’s knife disfigured and permanently marred. Dr. Griffith claimed the mangled nose was due to her refusal to follow instructions and not to his carelessness and negligence. She, too, wanted $100,000.
Poor Dr. Griffith. Getting sued for allegedly botching nose jobs wasn’t his worst luck. That came on May 30, 1937 when he died in an automobile accident as a passenger in a car driven by Herman Steiner. The two were on their way back to Hollywood from the annual North-South match when Steiner hit another car head-on. Griffith was killed outright while the driver of the other car was critically injured.
About 5,500 miles away over in Ostend, Belgium, 1937 was was a good year for Swiss master Henri Grob. There were no Elo ratings in those days, but Chessmetrics assigns Grob a rating of 2474 in 1937 which places him number 172 in the world. That year Reuben Fine was assigned a rating of 2676 (6th in the world) and Paul Keres’ rating is listed as 2713 (8th in the world). Remember, both Fine and Keres were among the world’s elite and in 1938 they shared first place at the legendary AVRO tournament. And yet there was the unheralded Grob, who beat both of them, taking first place on tiebreaks.
One of the most famous and instructive games of the tournament was played between Paul Keres and Reuben Fine. Controlling the center is a key opening principle, but it has advantages in the middlegame and endgame, too.
In this game, the players come out of the opening in a position where it is very difficult to determine the correct strategy and the play of both players was clever, but in the end it was Keres’ control of the center that enabled his K-side attack to succeed. It’s also rife with clever tactics.
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