"Country: German Empire"

"The first was a tendency to make serious oversights."

"The second problem area was an inclination to adopt totally the wrong plan."

"The third main problem area was that of endgame play."

These are the three main reasons for the generally weak play by past masters, according to Nunn; he uses as his data Karlsbad 1911, where Süchting scored -2 and tied for 14-16th among 26 participants:

"In order to be more specific about Karlsbad, take one player: Hugo Süchting (1874-1916). At Karlsbad he scored 11.5/13.5 or 'minus 2', as they say these days - a perfectly respectable score. Having played over all his games at Karlsbad I think that I can confidently state that his playing strength was not greater than Elo 2100 (BCF 187) - and that was on a good day and with a following wind."

He was a pure amateur with hardly any practice. Ludwig Ernst Bachmann has described him as 'starker Naturschachspieler'

He was born and lived most of his life as a peasant proprietor in a secluded village of a few souls named 'Brackrade' near Eutin in Schleswig-Holstein, North-Germany.

The nearest bigger cities with chess societies, Kiel and Luebeck, were more than 40 resp. 50 km away.

(Could you imagine how a peasant some 110 years ago, after a hard working day on the fields jumped on his horse to ride to the next town, play some hours chess rode back and stand up in the fresh of the next day?)