Praeceptor Britanniae
In pre-pandemic times, which now seems almost to be in the Cretaceous Period, I speculated in the British Chess Magazine on the impact of two of those outstanding personalities in the universe of chess who made their mark by teaching, as much as by playing. This week I expand my thoughts on those two chess teachers and ideologues, Steinitz and Tarrasch, while updating my comments on contemporary British chess teaching.
Wilhelm Steinitz, the chess equivalent of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin combined, was the great strategic systematic chess thinker from the latter part of the 19th century. One of the major Steinitzian strategic precepts was to delay castling in order to establish the location of the enemy king. Once that had been determined, the strategic objective was then to castle on the opposite wing and launch a blitzkrieg attack against the opposing monarch. Using this method, Steinitz won famous victories during his lengthy career against such luminaries as Zukertort, Blackburne, Tchigorin and even the mighty Emanuel Lasker. This strategic ploy will also be seen in all of this week ’ s instructive games.
The theories of Steinitz were to be taken up and codified by the German grandmaster and teacher, Dr Siegbert Tarrasch (above, left). He thus earned himself the reputation of being the Praeceptor Germaniae, probably best translated as “the Lawgiver from Germany”. Tarrasch was a clear and logical mentor, but he also suffered from the dogmatism which affected both Marx and Freud. Indeed, for those who can read both Tarrasch and Freud in the original German, the stylistic similarities between these two great German-Jewish thinkers are strikingly apparent.
Thus, in his otherwise admirable manual Drei Hundert Schachpartien (“Three Hundred Games of Chess”), Tarrasch excoriates the move 3 Nd2 in the French Defence ( after 1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5) with which Tarrasch had previously been highly successful, on the utterly spurious grounds that 3… c5 enables Black to force the existence of an isolated queen’s pawn (IQP) and that , therefore, 3. Nd2 is “refuted!” There is no argument or discussion about it. Tarrasch used the German verb “widerlegen” which inescapably means “to refute.” The variation is still popular and ironically bears his name; only his “refutation” is forgotten.
Dogmatism has its place in the universal arsenal of pedagogy. Indeed, being emphatic and single-minded can assist in ramming home a message. It can, however, be taken too far. Modern teaching should be far more pragmatic and flexible.
I now digress with a brief horror story about chess coaching. A few years ago a promising chess prodigy asked to play a game against me where I would “ give no quarter”. After a few moves, the prodigy simply reversed the development of a piece he had just brought into play. The game did not last much longer!
Under interrogation, the eight year old confessed that a (clearly inept) coach had prematurely deluded him into mindlessly emulating the kind of super-refined subtlety which should really have remained in the domain of those who have progressed sufficiently to comprehend the seeming paradoxes of a Nimzowitsch, a Karpov or a Carlsen!
Superior advice is to be found in the writings of Julian Simpole, author of the book Junior Chess Training. Indeed , Julian is, to my mind, a re-embodiment of Dr Tarrasch, the Praeceptor Britanniae .
Julian has had the distinction of having trained both Luke McShane, who went on to become the youngest Boys’ U-10 World Champion (at the age of eight) as well as David Howell, who developed into Britain ’ s youngest grandmaster. Julian helped Howell on his path with a series of fourteen lessons, several of which are documented in his book. Indeed, Lawgiver does seem to fit the bill, and there is a handy parallel in Islamic history and culture. We refer to the great 16th-century Sultan in the former Constantinople, later Istanbul, as Suleyman the Magnificent, yet the Turks themselves prefer to recognise his magnificence with the epithet, Suleyman Kanuni, “Suleyman the Lawgiver”.
This week ’ s first game (James v Simpole) by the former trainer of Grandmasters David Howell and Luke McShane, shows the devastating consequence of postponing castling in dramatic form. It is to be found in the commentary to the main win against his future publishing partner, Julian Hardinge: Brighton Club Championship, 1991.
The remaining games show Steinitz implementing his own strategy of castling on opposite wings, while the final sample is a typically systematic win by the Praeceptor Germaniae himself.
Raymond Keene’s latest book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from Blackwell’s .
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