And what I am saying is (compared to modern masters) all opposition 80-90 years ago was weak. Nunn looked at the Carlsbad 1911 supertournament some time back, in which almost all the leading masters besides Lasker and Capablanca participated. Nunn concluded that an average master at Carlsbad would be about a 2100 in modern terms. This text has been posted before.

<[Watson: Here Nunn shows that openings weren't a problem in this tournament for the older players (who specialised in a few systems). Then he points out the generous time-limits in Karlsbad. Having eliminated those factors, he gives three reasons for his the weak play of the Karlsbad group:]

"The first was a tendency to make serious oversights. It is quite clear that the Karlsbad players were far more prone to severe errors than contemporary players. Even the leading players made fairly frequent blunders. Rubinstein, for example, who was then at virtually the peak of his career (1912 was his best year) failed to win with a clear extra rook against Tartakower ... He also allowed a knight fork of king and rook in an ending against Kostic..."

"The second problem area was an inclination to adopt totally the wrong plan...[examples follow]..."

"The third main problem area was that of endgame play...[horrendous examples of elementary blown endgames follow]..."

[Watson: In the course of research for a book, I made a lengthy look at endgames from a comparable period and found similar butchery, including some terrible blunders by top players such Lasker. The endgame skills of the great masters - excepting Rubinstein - are much exaggerated in books, for the reasons that Nunn gives, i.e, the understandable selection of a very small set of games for reasons of instruction and beauty.] >

http://www.chess.co.uk/twic/jwatson...

More excerpt. Here Watson is quoting Nunn:

<The method I chose to examine the games was a two-step process. I reasoned that a good way to eliminate differences resulting from 80 years' advance in chess theory was only to look for really serious errors - if you blunder a piece, it doesn't matter whether you understand Nimzowitsch's pawn-chain theories or not."

[Watson: Notice this important step. I'm always hearing (and reading) that "If the players of yesteryear could only catch up with opening theory, they'd be as good or better than today's players". The funny thing is that the many years (usually decades) of study that modern players put into opening theory should not only count towards their strength, but that study and practice contributes vastly to their understanding of the middlegame and even some endgames. The silly idea that you can just 'catch up' in opening theory ignores the vast undertaking that this would involve, especially to absorb the vast number of openings and opening variations necessary to a complete chess education. Nunn removes this factor from the equation, to the enormous detriment of the modern masters' strength assessment! Surely this will roughly equalise things? Let him continue: ]

"To analyse almost 800 games from scratch by hand would take years, so first I used the automatic analysis feature of Fritz 5 to look at the games without human intervention. It was set in 'blundercheck' mode, which fitted in with my objective of looking for serious errors. Then I examined 'by hand' all the points raised by Fritz to decide whether they were genuine blunders or products of Fritz's imagination.

I had no particular preconceptions about what the results of this search would be. Like most contemporary grandmasters, I was familiar with all the standard textbook examples from the early part of the century, but I had never before undertaken a systematic examination of a large number of old games. I was quite surprised by the results. To summarize, the old players were much worse than I expected. The blunders thrown up by Fritz were so awful that I looked at a considerable number of complete games 'by hand', wondering if the Fritz results really reflected the general standard of play. They did. By comparison, the Fritz search on the 1993 Biel Interzonal revealed relatively little; many of the points raised had already been examined in the players' own notes in Informator and elsewhere. I had originally intended to have the Karlsbad and Biel positions side-by-side in this chapter, but the results were so lopsided that I decided to concentrate on Karlsbad here. Some of the more interesting Biel positions may be found scattered throughout the rest of the book. >

Nunn then looks at Suechting, who finished in the middle of the pack:

I wish he had explained the basis of his 'confident statement'. Nunn didn't make any comparison to modern players. It seems like he just took it out of the air...

I think he underestimated Süchting's strength. His rating throughout 1911 was above 2550, which puts him within 300-point bracket with the top-rated player. It would imply that at that time leading masters were only equal to 2400-rated modern players. 2200-2300 seems more plausible.

<nimh>

Well, again, neither Lasker nor Capablanca was at Carlsbad, but I suspect Nunn would agree with a 2400 rating for leading masters there. A further excerpt: <

[Watson: You have to get the book to see these examples of Süchting's horrendous mistakes and misunderstandings. Nunn also has talks about more positions, and then includes a section of 30 Karlsbad "puzzles", representing all of the players. The positional mistakes by the top players are particularly telling.]

"Returning then to the question as to how Süchting scored 11.5 points, the answer is simply that the other players were not much better. If we assume Süchting as 2100, then his score implies an average rating for the tournament of 2129 - it would not even be assigned a category today. Based on the above, readers will not be surprised when I say that my general impression of the play at Karlsbad was quite poor...">

Lasker feared no one!

Not Tarrasch! Not Pillsbury! Not Rubinstein!

But if you wanted to challenge Lasker, you better raise the money or you should just crawl back under your rock.

I cannot agree with that assessment, both Rubinstein and Schlechter were less than 100 pts off Lasker according to the January 1911 list.

http://chessmetrics.com/cm/CM2/Sing...

Absolutely right.

<I have no clue what this <harrylime> is blatting on about. If you haven't tried explaining to this fool about Rubinstein I think I already mentioned what happened in that case.>

Lasker hid and cowered .. Pillsbury was there ..

Lasker was head baseball coach and math professor at Columbia University, and taught a young Jose Capablanca how to improve his swing.