<"Razor-sharp, he always followed his own rules. In spite of devotion to his own supposedly scientific method, his play was often witty and bright."

– Bobby Fischer (on Tarrasch)>

"Dr. Tarrasch is a thinker, fond of deep and complex speculation. He will accept the efficacy and usefulness of a move if at the same time he considers it beautiful and theoretically right.

But I accept that sort of beauty only if and when it happens to be useful. He admires an idea for its depth, I admire it for its efficacy. My opponent believes in beauty, I believe in strength. I think that by being strong, a move is beautiful too."

<Emanuel Lasker>
______________________________________________________- __________________

"Steinitz always looked for the objectively right move.

Tarrasch always claimed to have found the objectively right move.

Lasker did nothing of the kind. He never bothered about what might or might not be the objectively right move; all he cared for was to find whatever move was likely to be most embarrassing for the specific person sitting on the other side of the board."

<Jacques Hannak> ______________________________________________________- __________________-

"He has a profound liking for ugly opening moves."

So I was struck, not really by his enormous playing strength, which was already clear from his results, but by his witty, original sentences, which make him quotable to the present day. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many anonymous phrases or Tartakower aphorisms were in fact written by Tarrasch.

This is actually right. If you just drink the koolaid that some writers give you, you think that Tarrasch was dogmatic and dry. In reality, his writing is quite entertaining to read.

I have never read 300 Chess Games, but I remember being similarly surprised when I read Cheshire's profile of Tarrasch in the Hastings 1895 tournament book:

<33 at the time of the tournament, Tarrasch was born on March 5, 1862 at Breslau, where he commenced his education.

He is a man of the highest educational attainments, and not being able to devote so much time and attention to the game as devotees would like to see him do, his performances have been a little irregular, and at times he has completely disappeared from the chess world.

He enjoyed a considerable reputation in the game while at college and university, in spite of the pressures of his other studies, frequenting chess resorts where he played successfully with the habitues. It is said also that he was fond of correspondence chess and blindfold play.

Visitors to the Congress will remember him as a neat, well-dressed, sprightly gentleman of very engaging manners, and always with a fresh flower in his button-hole. Certainly a favorite with onlookers, his board was generally well patronized whoever was his opponent.

Journalistic work has occupied a considerable amount of his time, and his annotaitions are very far above the average. Those in this book were supplied in German, so that some may have lost a little of their pristine beauty in translation.>

A list of his leading successes follows. Also, from Lasker's bio in the same book:

But I have to admit his openings work. Both the Tarrasch Variation of the French and the Tarrasch Defence to the QGD seem to turn up in a lot of my games.

http://books.google.com/books?id=0C...

http://books.google.com/books?id=vS...

Unfortunately, though, I haven't found <300 Chess Games> or his Nuremberg 1896 tournament book.

DomDaniel, I hear you about his occasional dogmatism. Tarrasch could also be a terrible sore loser, but who among chess greats (except maybe Tal) is not? On his birthday, it's good to remember his comment on a game played by the fellow in Honza's avatar:

<And still among people there persists the legend that chess is too serious. Life is serious; chess is the cheerful art.>

See Albin vs Winawer, 1896

<To conclude my Tarrasch discussion, I want to say something about his famous 'dogmatism'. Tarrasch's popular historical image is that of a follower of Steinitz who rather dogmatically followed the latter's ideas while expanding them to embrace the virtues of quick development and space control. I think that any objective study of Tarrasch has to conclude that he was indeed more dogmatic than most players of his stature, not only in his extreme statements about openings, but in assessments of strategies and even of individual moves. On the other hand, he played moves he had earlier criticized, and didn't seem to take his own theories as seriously as Steinitz did when it came to practical play. He also tried to establish himself as an original contributor to chess theory, independent of Steinitz. An interesting passage from 'The Game of Chess' addresses Steinitz's 'strong' recommendation that, versus rook-pawn attacks such as h4-h5-h6, it was best to allow the pawn to advance to h6 and then play …g6, after which the pawn at h6 would be weak in the endgame. Steinitz also warned against blocking the pawn's advance by means of …h6, for fear of weakening the g6 square. Tarrasch proudly argues against this, asserting: "Therefore never allow an enemy rook pawn to advance to the sixth rank, but block the advance by playing your own rook pawn one or two squares forward-a principle first enunciated by the author and diametrically opposed to the teaching of Steinitz. On this point, as on many others, I had been obliged to contest the teachings of that great theoretician. Here are some examples to demonstrate the truth of my dictum…" [italics his]. Of course, the truth is that one sometimes allows such an advance and one sometimes blocks it. There are no valid 'dicta' or principles about such matters. But it shows how determined that thinkers like Steinitz and Tarrasch were to put chess on a rigorous scientific basis, even to the extent of establishing rules for a particular type of pawn advance.

To this day, our elementary texts are full of bogus guidelines about more important topics than rook pawn advances, so we should not feel too smug about such quaint arguments. It would be very interesting to compare the results of using Tarrasch's The Game of Chess as an elementary textbook with those of using our five bestselling introductory books. I doubt that 70 years or so of added chess experience would prove to have benefited the latter.>

http://www.chesscenter.com/twic/jwa...

And here is Cardinal Newman on the evil of anti-dogmatism. We are so used to using "dogmatic" as a term of abuse that it can be quite bracing to read a man who thought it a term of praise.

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/a...