1890 Steinitz vs. Chigorin Cable Match

 

     Barring tactical oversights, the winner is going to be the player who is able to perform the deeper and more exact evaluation of the positions that arise as he makes his calculations. Of course, sometimes accurately appraising a position can be difficult, especially in practical play with limited thinking time. 

     Everybody knows that, but the idea that a player’s actions should be determined based on a correct assessment of the position was first elaborated by Wilhelm Steinitz. 

     Prior to Steinitz, during the Romantics Period players sacrificed pieces and Pawns haphazardly with great insouciance. Sometimes such play resulted in grandeur and brilliance, giving us “the Immortal game” or “the Evergreen game”.

     Then along came Steinitz who showed that what is fundamental is the position on the board which serves as the source from which the ideas arise. Of course, even before Steinitz some masters had unearthed positional rules. For example, Morphy showed the importance of rapid development. 

     But, it was Steinitz who amalgamated and formulated the laws of positional chess. He taught that you could assess any position by breaking it down into its component parts such as material, strong and weak squares, open files, etc. Steinitz' discovery resulted in the raising of the strength of all players in general as they began to apply his principles. In The Middle Game in Chess Eugene Znosko-Borovsky tried to break down the game into three element, Space, Time and Force.  Larry Evans did the same thing, adding Pawn structure in his New Ideas In Chess, which really contained nothing new.

     However, Steinitz overrated the significance of the principles he had formulated because he did not take into account any peculiarities of the individual position. His rules, he believed, were effective in all positions. In his writings decades ago C.J.S. Purdy pointed out that you could have an advantage in Space, Time, Force (and Pawn Structure), yet because of some aberration in the position be dead lost.

     In 1888 when the Havana Chess Club asked Steinitz to choose his most worthy opponent, without hesitation he selected Mikhail Chigorin, the man who had beaten Steinitz in tournament play and was one of his most outspoken critics. For his part Steinitz called Chigorin "a genius of practical play who regards it as his privilege at every convenient opportunity to challenge the principles of modern chess theory." Chigorin was a sharp tactician who loved gambits. 

     The two played a world championship match in Havana in 1889 and it was won by Steinitz +10 -6 =1, the lone draw coming in the last game. They went at it again in 1892, also in Havana and Steinitz again won +10 -8 =5. 

     In between the championship matches was a two game cable match between them in 1890. These two games were played to test assertions made by Steinitz in The Modern Chess Instructor with regard to the soundness of a couple of opening variations. 

     One was the Evans Gambit and the other was a Two Knights Defense. The latter is especially interesting because after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nf6 4.Ng5 d5 5.exd5 Na5 6.Bb5+ c6 7.dxc6 bxc6 8.Be2 h6 the innovation of 9.Nh3 was resurrected by Bobby Fischer in his game against Arthur Bisguier in the 1963 US Championship.

     In this match each player had 48 hours to make their moves and were allowed to consult with one other player. Steinitz chose Isidor Gunsberg and Chigorin' s partne was Andrey Markov. 

     Players had six one-day delays and any time time saved was carried over,. Additionally, fines of $5 a day were applied, with a player exceeding their time for over 10 days losing the match. The stakes were $750 a side. 

     Celso Golmayo from Cuba served as referee and Albert von Rothschild was the stakeholder. Two umpires were also used, Professor Isaac Rice in New York, and Peter Saburov in St. Petersburg. 

     The match began on Thursday night, October 23, 1890. The moves were cabled by Reuter's (London) and Associated Press (New York) to newspapers throughout the world. Steinitz himself, recently hired as chess columnist for the New York Daily Tribune, covered the games in detail, sometimes overly optimistically. The match was suspended midway through in order for Steinitz to play his collaborator Gunsberg in a match for the world championship. 

     Writing about Chigorin's play in the match, Steinitz said Chigorin conducted his attacks in the same way as he did in most of thier match games...that is, he was a representative of the old school who was "convinced of the usefulness of pressing forward with his Pawns and even sacrificing one or more of them in order to give his opponent trouble on the K-side or constrict the enemy pieces." 

     In the end though, it was the Old School Romantic style of Chigorin that triumphed over the positional Modern style of Steinitz.