Steinitz

His life in chapters

1. 1836–1861

   Out of the Prague ghetto

   Prague, 1836 — the thirteenth child of a poor Jewish family. I went to Vienna to study and stayed to survive, playing chess for stakes in the coffee houses. I was small, lame, and utterly certain of one thing: that this game, beneath the fireworks, obeyed laws. Nobody had written them down yet.

2. 1862–1872

   The Austrian Morphy

   I came to London for the 1862 tournament and never went home. In those years I attacked like everyone else — gambits, sacrifices, king hunts — and in 1866 I defeated the great Anderssen himself, fourteen games without a single draw. They called me the Austrian Morphy. They did not yet know I was about to betray everything that name stood for.

3. 1873–1885

   The doctrine

   I won Vienna 1873 and then, for years, I played little and thought much. What I found I set down in my writings, later in my International Chess Magazine: the attack is not a right, it is a consequence. Accumulate small advantages; do not attack until the position demands it; the king can be a strong piece. They mocked the theory. The theory did not care.

4. 1886–1893

   The first world champion

   1886. Zukertort and I sat down in America to decide, for the first time officially, who was champion of the world. I won — and the title I had argued into existence was mine. I defended it against Chigorin and Gunsberg, playing my science against their fire. I had proved that chess is not a duel of geniuses but a demonstration, move by move, of the truth.

5. 1894–1900

   The fall of the founder

   In 1894 a young German mathematician named Lasker took my crown, and in the rematch he took it more emphatically still. My last years were poor and dark, and I died in New York in 1900 with almost nothing. Almost: every champion who came after me played by laws I discovered. The doctrine outlived the man. It always does.