A Century of Chess: Bogoljubow-Euwe 1928-29
FIDE — the Féderation Internationale des Échecs — has had a deeply vexed career and, fittingly, the organization got off to a rocky start. Founded in 1924 as an outgrowth of the Paris Olympic Games, the organization struggled to get traction or to identify its purpose. The suggestion, from about 1925, was to try to get into the business of organizing the world championship, but Capablanca in 1922 had already set the stakes of a world championship at $10,000, which was far beyond the fundraising capacity of FIDE. Resourcefully but maybe unwisely, Alexander Rueb, FIDE’s president, had the idea then of creating a separate championship — the FIDE championship — which would be parallel to the world championship. There’s nothing so crazy about this in principle — at any given moment, there can be all sorts of championships floating around — but the worth of a second-tier international championship becomes very difficult to assess.
If the decision to host this poor man’s championship was questionable, Rueb made an unquestioned blunder in the unilateral decision of inviting Bogoljubow and Euwe. Why Bogoljubow? Why Euwe? Bogoljubow, certainly, was a viable world championship candidate but had no better claim to the title than Rubinstein, Nimzowitsch, Tartakower or, of course, Capablanca himself. Euwe meanwhile was a talented up-and-comer but had never won an international tournament and may not even have been in the world’s top ten. Alekhine, who generally was supportive of the FIDE project, found himself compelled to write: "Is the sole reason [for Euwe's selection] the fact that the President of FIDE is of the same nationality? Certainly I would not wish to believe so."
So the match was held, Bogoljubow convincingly defeated Euwe, became the FIDE champion, which mattered a great deal to Bogoljubow although likely not to anyone else, and then for no very clear reason FIDE held a repeat of the match later the same year, with an identical result.
The randomness of all of this did much to discredit FIDE to a quizzical public (even Rueb had to concede that the public had reacted "with astonishment and incomprehension") but from an organizational standpoint Rueb did seem to know what he was doing — a classical case of activity being its own reward. FIDE found itself somewhere on the map of the chess world. Bogoljubow’s victory was instrumental in setting up his challenge to Alekhine in 1929. And Euwe found himself FIDE’s favorite son, an arrangement that helped to facilitate FIDE’s assumption, after World War II, of the world championship cycle proper.
Lost in the midst of this bureaucratic maneuvering was a perfectly well-played pair of matches between two aggressive, fighting players. In the late ‘20s, Bogoljubow was the stronger of the two. (That dynamic would likely reverse within a few years.) The main idea being worked out in the match can be thought of as a kind of 'establishment hypermodernism.' Bogoljubow and Euwe weren't ideologues in the way that Nimzowitsch and Réti were. They were both supremely practical players, but they had taken in the lessons of hypermodernism and believed that hypermodern openings gave them dynamic possibilities through the middlegame. The first match in particular was a workout for the 'Indian openings,' in particular the cutting-edge Grunfeld and King's Indian Attack. Bogoljubow, though, seemed to tire of the innovation and towards the end of the first match and into the second switched to more orthodox means as black of responding to the queen's pawn opening, but the games retained their forward-looking, dynamic character.
In the first match, Euwe drew first blood, winning off a blunder. Bogoljubow evened things in Game 4 by working up a vicious attack in a queenless middlegame. Euwe pulled ahead again, dominating the position out of a pioneering King's Indian Attack in Game 6. But Bogoljubow pulled even again in a tactically messy game and then went ahead for good in another fast-paced queenless middlegame in Game 8.
In the second match, held on the heels of the Bad Kissingen tournament, where Bogoljubow and Euwe both featured in the leaderboard together with Capablanca, the players traded four draws. Bogoljubow won a grim positional game in Game 5. Euwe evened things up with a pawnroller on the kingside in Game 6. And then Bogoljubow won what would prove the decisive game in Game 7, with a near-perfect imitation of Bogoljubow's pawnroller.
The questionable bureaucratic standing of the match obscures how important it was in chess history. Alekhine, who seems to have been at a loss for how to select his challenger, would ultimately kind of defer to FIDE and play Bogoljubow and Euwe against the howls of protest of the chess world. And FIDE, by hook or crook, did manage to insert itself into the world championship conversation and to become, after the war, the defining body in world title chess.
Sources: Edward Winter covers the story of the matches nicely in his post on the subject.
