The Father of Chess Strategy
Wilhelm Steinitz
(1836-1900)
Chess in the Romantic era, from the late 18th to the 19th century, was centred around bold and aggressive moves. Players were all about sacrificing pieces for quick attacks and clever combinations. Legends like Paul Morphy and Adolf Anderssen were the stars of the show. They believed that attacking was the key to victory, and the best attacker would always win. Defending wasn’t really a thing, and some even thought it was a sign of weakness. There are some incredible games from that time, like the “Immortal” and “Evergreen” games of Anderssen, but when you look at them from a modern perspective, it’s clear that opponents could have put up a much stronger fight.
Wilhelm Steinitz was born in 1836 in Prague to a poor Jewish family. He was the seventh of thirteen siblings, and not much is known about his early life. He went to university in Vienna in 1858, but he failed to pass all his first-year exams and had to drop out. But by then, he was totally into chess and might have already decided to make it his life. He quickly became the best Austrian player.
Steinitz thought chess was inherently balanced and that an attack had to be based on solid positional factors to be effective. This idea went against the Romantic way of playing chess. This led to a huge rivalry between him and Johannes Zukertort, which was called the “Ink War” (you can read more about it in the book “The Ink War” by Willy Hendricks, which came out in 2022). Over the board, Steinitz beat Zukertort in the first World Chess Championship Match and became the first World Champion.
Steinitz turned his ideas into words and wrote down a set of rules. He basically laid the groundwork for positional chess without even realising it. He never actually made a list of all the positional factors he thought were important.
Emanuel Lasker, the second World Chess Champion, understood the significance of Steinitz’s findings. He then used Steinitz’s “formulae” to create a table of positional elements:
Permanent advantages:
Material advantage
Bad king position
Passed pawn in the middle game
Weak pawns for the opponent
Strong and weak squares
Pawn islands
Strong pawn center
Control of a diagonal
Control of a file
Bishop pair
Control of a rank
Temporary advantages:
Bad piece position
Inharmoniously placed pieces
Advantage in development
Concentration of pieces in the center (centralization)
Space advantage
This list has been the foundation of strategic theory ever since. Lasker called this list “Steinitz’s Elements,” giving all the credit to his predecessor.
Kevin
I shall be running a training session at the club on Tuesday 17th December on Strategic Assessment