You are overstating the value of Nimzo's contribution relative to the instruction of greater players who have exhibited more depth in their play - supported by annotation, and to some extent in their writings. On the latter, "Chess Fundamentals" (JRC) and "Think Like a Grandmaster" (Kotov) come to mind. Nimzo was an expert at marketing popularized, easy to grasp concepts, but was not able to demonstrate through his own play that his pedagogical contribution merits his deification.

Do the great GMs of yesteryear and today really feel so indebted to him? ("Overprotection, blockade - Bobby can you figure this out?")

Really? http://felixstowechess.tripod.com/p...

<Nunn–Tal, Wijk aan Zee, 1982
1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cd4 4.Nd4 Nc6 5.Nc3 a6 6.g3 Qc7 7.Bg2 Nf6 8.0-0 h6 9.Nb3 Be7 10.a4 d6 11.f4 0-0 12.g4 Bd7 13.h4 b5 14.g5 Nh7 15.Be3 b4 16.Ne2 d5 17.ed5 ed5 18.Qd5 Rac8 19.a5 Nb8 20.Ned4 Bg4 21.Rae1 Rfd8 22.Qe4 Re8 23.Bf2 Bd7 24.Qd5 Qd6 25.Nf5 Qd5 26.Ne7+ Re7 27.Bd5 Re1 28.Re1 Rc2 29.Re7 Bc6 30.Bf7+ Kf8 31.Rc7 hg5 32.Bc5+ 1-0.

Nunn wrote after this game that so far as he could remember he hardly calculated a single variation more than a couple of moves deep during the entire game.

There is another important finding by de Groot, which has been confirmed again and again by later researchers. Chess players, including the very best, do not as a rule immediately make a short and neat mental list of candidate moves that they then consider one at a time. This is simply not how people approach most problems, nor is there any reason why they should approach all problems that way.

One author I remembered who was heavily into the idea of calculation being the touchstone of chess mastery and the use of concepts like candidate moves, and the tree of analysis was Alexander Kotov:

Of the many scientific techniques studied at secondary school level and after for clarifying problems a particularly helpful one is the drawing of graphs and diagrams.

This is Kotov's famous tree of analysis approach to calculating variations and analysis in general. Later on he exhorts us to be self disciplined in its use:

In analyzing complicated variations one must examine each branch of the tree once and once only. You simply must not wander to and fro, here and there throughout the branches, losing time in checking. The reason for such checks can only be lack of confidence in oneself. Better to suffer the consequences of an oversight than suffer from foolish and panicky disorder in analysis.

I remember when I first read this some years ago how well intentioned but implausible the whole seemed to be. Were top ranking chess masters really so intellectually well organized and rigorous as Kotov implied? De Groot's findings seem on the face of it to run counter to Kotov's approach. It may be, of course, that this is the method Kotov himself used and so it would have been natural for him to encourage others to adopt it.>

[Event "It"]
[Site "London (England)"]
[Date "1883"]
[Round ""]
[White "Englisch Berthold (AUT)"]
[Black "Blackburne Joseph H (ENG)"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[Eco "E43"]
[Annotator ""]
[Source ""]

Lowenthal vs E Williams, 1851

Staunton vs E Williams, 1851

Wyvill vs Adolf Anderssen, 1851

(Even Reti did not comprehend Nimzo's play first; only after Nimzo's writings came out Reti started to think the world of him.)

<Nimzo was definitely a top 10 player> -- right there with the best of them. Here is a couple of flatering rating lists:

Sonas' June 1913 ratings: 1.Rubinstein, 2. Nimzowich, 3. Marshall, 4. Tarrasch, 5. Lasker, 6. Schlechter, 7. Spielmann, 8. Alechine, 9. Teichmann, 10. Capablanca,...

Sonas' Oct 1927 ratings: 1. Capablanca, 2. Alekhine 3. Nimzowich, 4. Bogolubov, 5. Lasker, 6. Vidmar, 7. Rubinstein 8. Spielmann, 8. Euwe, 10. Tartakower,...

Nimzo did branch from Steinitz a stylistic line of playing, complementary to that of Tarrasch and Rubinstein. The chronological line of Nimzo style greats goes approximately as thus: Steinitz - Nimzo - Flohr - Petrosian - Karpov; and it includes such players of today as, say, Adams. Some may not like this playing style, but it is hard to deny its successes. Steinitz did some early explorations and experimentations, but Nimzo put down its coherent foundations. In my view, it takes a genius of first rank to improve and extend from where Steinitz left off, especially when most of the chess world already rushed head over heels to extended Steinitz discoveries along different philosophical lines, and dismissed these Steintz experiments as idiosyncratic and baroque aspects of his play.

Nimzo-indian is named after Nimzo because many players believe that he was the one who took this previously ridiculed and largely discarded opening sequence and put new strategic content into it.

To may way of thinking, it is also a big difference if one plays 1.f4, with the idea to possibly later develop by b3 and Bb2; and to play 1.b3, with the idea to possibly later undermine (or block) Black center by f4. It seems to me that especially players professing to admire dynamic style of play should appreciate the difference in the two strategic contents.

Nimzo often played Bxc3 because the c3, c4, d4 pawn structure simply interested him. He also understood this structure better than most of his contemporaries and thus it was a pretty practical way of playing for him. That is actually something Lasker became famous for -- approaching chess as what later became known in mathematical game theory as a game against nature.

But to reduce Nimzovich work to Bxc3 is like reducing Hokusay to one curl of his wave. Besides, if it takes 3/4 of a century and likes of Kasparov to make Bxc3 into a second-best move, than I think that it rather compliments instead of detracts from Nimzowich.

Many of Nimzo's theories are exactly that, theories: He obsterves a phenomenon of play, and figures out reasons for why it is so. <... Commonly, at least in the paxis of masters, the mobility of pawns gets restrained by a blocade. But, to my knowledge, no one till now tried to justify theoretically the importantce of such play. A discovery of an explanation would resolve the shortcomming!> Nimzowich "The Blocade."

I come of a scientific/mathematical background. Probably the most despicable crime in that community is to steal ideas -- or to wantonly diminish ideas, assign them away from the man who came up with the discoveries and generously shared with the rest of us.

It does happen all the time, but I feel very strongly about that.

Simply put, you want to blockade an
isolated, passed pawn with whatever
the weakest piece you have is. So,
in order, that means, Knight, Bishop,
Rook, and finally Queen, the knight
being the best blockader, the queen
the worst. You want to do this early
and often. Trade off pieces, and
play for an endgame.

On the other hand, when you have
the isolated pawn, you want to use
the 2 squares the pawn controls
as outpost squares for your knights
or rooks, avoid piece exchanges, and
if possible, push that pawn.

("My Sytem" would also do.) I mean it not in jest. Nimzovich books realy are about <why>, and only little about <what>.

(But the above <what> can stand a bit of improvement.)

<Do you think Nimzo was following through and expanding on the earlier work of Steinitz?> Steinitz, Chigorin, and, curiously, Tarrasch were his largest inspirations. (Reti points out the connections to Steinitz in his Masters of Chessboard; Lawrence Day pointed out here, on cg.com, several hypermodern motivations from Chigorins play.) The connection to Tarrasch is more of a counterpositive, duality-like nature.

If you are playing against the isolted pawn you want to exchange the bishops that is the color of the square afront of the pawn and keep the bishops that are the color of the square which the pawn is on. This way you have a good bishop that is pressing on the pawn, while they have a bad bishop that has to defend a pawn.

A telling example is the situation Larsen pointed out. Sometimes aiming to blockade an advancing pawn can instead obstruct a player from the real goal-- to win it in the end. In other words, sometimes taking the time to reroute a knight to the proper blockading square constitutes not just a loss of tempo, but an incorrect loss if in retrospect you find that the tempo spent on a failed blockade could have been used to set up enough pressure to win the pawn instead.

Note that a blockade is not necessary to deal with every sort of threat that comes along, be it a passed pawn or something else. If the pawn cannot advance (for example via tactical threat or some other type of restraint), there may not be a reason to post a knight in front of it (static restraint). In such a case, blockading might even inhibit you from posing a threat to the pawn. As Seirawan once noted, a pawn is only weak if it can be attacked, and obviously blockading a pawn usually makes it hard for your rooks to level against it.

As you can see, the theories are all pretty simple, but they must be applied very rigorously and in the right way for a given position.

"It is the aim of the modern school, not to treat every position according to one general law, but according to the principle inherent in the position." - Reti

<Simply put, you want to blockade an isolated, passed pawn with whatever
the weakest piece you have is. So,
in order, that means, Knight, Bishop,
Rook, and finally Queen, the knight
being the best blockader, the queen
the worst.> Actually, rook is often better blocading piece than night -- especially in endgames and ... on the rook-file!

But the real point is that the player who understands the principles behind the phenomenon will be able to judge the position, and where a rule applies where it does not.

You keep harping on Nimzo for giving only "rigid" rules of thumb. Yes, he did put some rules of thumb into the books for the turkies like us. But he also put into those books the principles that gave him those rules of thumb. Those principles are abstract and much harder to absorb into blod stream, however, and so Nimzo also gave those rules of thumb -- partly because they are useful, partly as examples of what can be done with the theory. To think that "My System" is simply a collection or rules of thumb is off mark.