A Century of Chess: Baden-Baden 1925
From a sporting perspective, these were the storylines in chess in the mid-1920s: 1.the invincibility of Capablanca, the question of whether anybody would ever come close to him; 2.the surprising resurgence of Lasker, winning a pair of international tournaments; 3.the rise of the hypermoderns, led by Richard Réti, and their new way of playing chess; 4.the duel for the vice-championship of the world, as contested by Alexander Alekhine and Akiba Rubinstein.
By 1925, though, it was clear that Alekhine was a cut ahead. For one thing, Rubinstein was chronically poor and unmarketable and would never secure the funding for a championship match. For another, Alekhine was emerging, simply, as the better player. He put an exclamation mark on that with a resounding triumph at Baden-Baden, winning by a point-and-a-half and doing so with the signature ferocity that set him apart not only from Rubinstein but from Capablanca. Savielly Tartakower was so taken by Alekhine’s play that he made the contrast to Capablanca explicit: "Capablanca won the London tournament in 1922 because he was the world champion; Lasker won in New York in 1924 as if he were the world champion; but Alekhine won the Baden-Baden tournament like a real world champion."
The mature style of Alekhine had already become fully evident. He seemed to somehow float above both classicism and hypermodernism — there was a strategic soundness to his play, and he was interested in the hypermoderns’ deep study of the opening — but in his play the initiative and the attack were given priority and he seemed to revive romanticism within the constraints of the ‘scientific school.’
Faced with the onslaught of this new style of play, Rubinstein — the epitome of classicism — held his own but couldn’t quite match Alekhine’s torrid pace.
In third place, Friedrich Saemisch had the result of his career. Saemisch was seen as the future of hypermodernism, with an almost monk-like exegesis of the opening and attention to the development of new systems. The game with Alekhine above is an indication of how far Saemisch was willing to go in the new style — delaying central advances, playing on the wings, finding unlikely points of coordination between his pieces.
As much as anything else, the tournament is remembered as the début of Carlos Torre Repetto, the strongest-ever Mexican player. Torre is one of these chess players who seems to disappear instantly into legend. His reputation had preceded him — he was known as a slashing, almost visionary attacker and had defeated Marshall in seven moves in a game played on the voyage to Europe — and Alekhine, fearing a second Capablanca, took a quick draw with him in the first round. Torre actually didn’t do particularly well, finishing only in tenth place at the tournament, but there was something startling about his style. He introduced new openings into master practice — the Torre Attack and the hallucinatory Two Knights Tango (also called the Mexican Defense in his honor) — and he embarrassed Gruenfeld with the staid-looking Stonewall. The idea in his play was slightly amateurish-seeming setups that actually radiated immense power. The other piece of the Torre legend was his tendency to offer draws from superior positions — which has been taken as a sign of chivalry and of interest only in the artistic rather than sporting aspects of the game, although contemporaries assumed that Torre simply was nervous faced with such a starry field.
The tournament also introduced a significant feature of 20th century chess — a Soviet player dispatched to do battle with the West. In this case, it was the generally-forgotten Ilya Rabinovich, who acquitted himself well, scoring +4 and with scalps of Bogoljubow, Spielmann, and Tarrasch but without exactly striking terror into the hearts of the Western grandmasters.
The tournament was largely organized by Siegbert Tarrasch in an attempt to revive German chess, and it was a melancholy milestone for him — a clear indication that his skills had severely declined. He scored -5, finished in fifth-to-last place, and his loss to Alekhine would do the rounds of the anthologies for years to come. 
Sources: The tournament is discussed in Gabriel Velasco, The Life and Games of Carlos Torre, Alexander Alekhine, My Best Games of Chess, Frank Marshall, My 50 Years of Chess, Savielly Tartakower, The Hypermodern Game of Chess, etc.
