A Century of Chess: Chess in the 1920s
Let’s face it. This decade is a bit of a slog. The war choked off young talent, with the exception of Euwe and (briefly Torre), and the decade was spent with the same ten or twelve players, all of whom had emerged on the international scene before the war, endlessly playing one another.
On the other hand, the decade was the absolute peak of chess as a glamour activity. The tournaments were held in elegant spas, the opening variations had a way of being named after ocean liners or resort towns. In the photos, chess looks as stylish as it probably ever will — the players in their suits, all of them, it seemed, from these exotic backgrounds, and chess gave the appearance of a rarefied gentlemanly pastime. The sport’s status had a great deal to do with the style and personality of Capablanca — and the chess community rightly regarded him as a gift to themselves from the gods.
The decade featured also the single greatest rivalry in chess history, with Alekhine gradually tracking down Capablanca. Almost every sports cliché applies here — it was grit against ease, the perennial underdog against the born-champion, the exile against the playboy, and the story of the match reads like a fable about the value of hard work and the dangers of complacency. My favorite story about Alekhine and Capablanca has the two of them attending a music hall exhibition together — Capablanca, said an observer, never took his eyes off the dancing girls while Alekhine never took his eyes off a pocket chess set. The terms of the rivalry were set as early as 1913, with Alekhine a rising star but Capablanca cast as the champion-apparent, and with Capablanca defeating Alekhine with ease in the games they played against each other. Alekhine then began a long campaign of avoiding tournaments in which Capablanca was playing while building up his own strength. The turning point seems to have come in the New York 1927 tournament where Capablanca lapped the field and Alekhine faded into the background — but with Alekhine subjecting Capablanca’s play to real scrutiny. He came to the conclusion that there was a great deal of superficiality in Capablanca’s game, that he relied on technique but could be tactically very sloppy even in the quiet positions where he was deemed invincible. In the 1927 match, Alekhine played, amazingly, not at all like himself — there were no baroque attacks, very little opening imaginativeness. He played dull lines of the Queen’s Gambit Declined — steered straight for Capablanca’s strength in pure positional play, and managed to outlast him by being just a shade more tenacious and precise.
The other salient point of chess in the ‘20s was the hypermodern revolution. Hypermodernism is one of the most contested terms in chess history and I am far from being able to offer a comprehensive definition. What I would point to are a few different strands. In the ‘20s the first real intrusion of hypermodernism came from Réti in his victory at Gothenburg 1920. Réti, who had spent the war years developing his chess theories, emphasized wing play and flexible opening setups as white. He tended to defer the central challenge into the early middle game where the kinetic power packed in his position could prevail in hand-to-hand combat in the center.
Meanwhile, Nimzowitsch, who had done pioneering work with hypermodernism in the early 1910s, returned to competitive chess towards the mid-1920s and played in a genuinely bizarre but also compelling style. Nimzowitsch’s play involved — famously — the blockade and prophylaxis, a defense-first approach in which the other side’s initiative was gradually stalled and his own defensive resources prevailed. If Réti’s victories always seemed to come from the white side, Nimzowitsch broke new ground in particular when playing as black.
While Réti and Nimzowitsch’s play often seemed theoretical and overwrought, the chess world was quicker to embrace the onslaught of opening ideas that came out of the hypermodern movement. These were, in particular, the ‘Indian systems,’ which at long last offered black a dynamic way to play against 1.d4 from the very first moves. Saemisch and Gruenfeld did much of the theoretical work in these lines and have their names commemorated in many of the variations but it was really Bogoljubow who was the theoretical trailblazer and showed how dangerous some of the new lines could be. The 1929 match with Alekhine, though, was a real setback for the hypermodern openings — with black, both Alekhine and Bogoljubow struggled to make Indian systems work against simple, direct play and abandoned the new openings over the course of the match.
The last strain of hypermodernism was a synthesis that Alekhine seemed to put together over the later part of the decade and that later emerged with the Soviet School. The Soviet players ended up with very little of the cat-and-mouse games and practical jokes that Nimzowitsch, Breyer, and the early hypermodern practitioners were so fond of. They took in the diversity of opening ideas that the hypermoderns produced and used it to build wide-ranging repertoires, they were more willing to play on the wings early in the game than classical players had been, but above all they were attentive to dynamics in the position — they believed that the classical players overestimated space and static positional aspects and didn’t fully appreciate the power either of the initiative or of the carefully-contrived counterattack. 
As usual, in my decade roundups, I ‘host’ a tournament of the top players and use that for the rankings for my players’ bios. These shouldn’t be taken too seriously — since I count unplayed games as draws, there is an inbuilt advantage for those who played fewer games especially against the absolute top players. In this case that favors Torre, Levenfish, and Romanovsky — but, for the two Soviets, I consider their high placement here to be something of a karmic rebalancing for having had to spend their careers inside the Soviet Union and losing the opportunity to play internationally. This head-to-head method of ranking may not be as scientific as, say, Jeff Sonas’ but it at least gives some idea of how the players did in absolute top-flight competition. The surprises are that Alekhine finished ahead of Capablanca; the very strong showings of Torre and Levenfish (Levenfish’s based almost entirely on his play at Moscow 1925); and the strong showing of Vidmar, who also surprised in the 1910s and may be cementing his claim here as the most underrated player in chess history.
