This is a part of my weekend dive into the history of chess. See also Chess In Russia. I’ve also created a short video about it so you can watch it during lunch :)
Emanuel Lasker reigned as World Chess Champion for 27-years, and for most of those 27 years, his rivals were convinced he was kind of a hack.
His great opponent Siegbert Tarrasch dismissed him as a mere “coffee-house player.” The consensus among the elite was that Lasker didn’t win by playing the best moves, but by playing confusing, complicated, sometimes objectively bad moves that lured his opponents into a state of psychological turmoil.
It is no easy matter to reply correctly to Lasker’s bad moves
Lasker was a trickster. He was a psychological player. But his trick was realizing, a century before anyone else, that chess isn’t a math problem. It’s a street fight. He wasn’t just a chess player; he was a PhD mathematician, a philosopher, an inventor, and a man who treated the World Championship less like a title and more like a hostile takeover. He was a friend of Einstein, a refugee from both the Nazis and the Soviets, and perhaps the most thoroughly modern, pragmatic, and misunderstood genius of his time.
I: The Education of a Hustler
Emanuel Lasker was born in 1868 in a small Prussian town, the son of a synagogue cantor. This is the standard opening for a 19th-century intellectual biography: humble origins, a clear spark of brilliance. At age 11, he was sent to Berlin to study mathematics.
And this is where the story immediately gets interesting. In Berlin, he lived with his older brother, Berthold, who happened to be one of the ten best chess players in the world. Berthold taught his little brother the game, and Emanuel quickly discovered something important: while mathematics was intellectually stimulating, it didn’t pay. Playing chess for small stakes in the smoky Berlin cafés, however, did.
This is the key to understanding all of Lasker. For his aristocratic or dogmatic rivals, chess was an art form, a scientific pursuit to uncover objective truth on the board. For Lasker, a poor student trying to make rent, it was a job. And when you’re playing for your next meal, you don’t care about the Platonic ideal of a chess move. You care about maximizing your expected value against the flawed, nervous, overconfident human sitting across from you.
II: The World Championship as a Leveraged Buyout
When Lasker finally challenged the 58-year-old Wilhelm Steinitz for the World Championship in 1894, he was a 25-year-old upstart. He won, to the shock of the chess world. The critics immediately dismissed it as a fluke, a victory over an old man past his prime.
Lasker’s response was not to sulk. It was to look at the business model of being “World Champion.” He saw that Steinitz, the father of modern chess, was living in poverty and would die there. Lasker decided this was a suboptimal outcome. He proceeded to transform the World Championship from a gentlemanly honor into a professional franchise, and he was its CEO, chairman, and majority shareholder.
He demanded enormous appearance fees. He claimed copyright on the match games. And most importantly, he dictated the terms. This led to one of the most bizarre and fascinating episodes in chess history: the 1910 match against Carl Schlechter.
Schlechter was the “drawing master,” a notoriously solid player who was almost impossible to beat. Going into the tenth and final game of their championship match, Schlechter was leading by one point. He needed only a draw with the White pieces to become the new World Champion. It was, for a player of his style, a near certainty.
And then a very strange thing happened. Schlechter got a winning position… and kept playing for a win. He took unnecessary risks, overextended, blundered, and lost. Lasker tied the match 5-5 and, under the rules, retained his title.
Why? Why would a man who needed only to play safely suddenly risk everything?
For a century, the answer has been shrouded in the “Schlechter Mystery.” The most common theory is that the match contract, which Lasker had written, contained a secret clause: to win the title, the challenger had to win the match by a margin of two points. A one-point lead was meaningless. Schlechter, knowing this, was forced to play for a win in the final game because a draw was the same as a loss.
It was, in modern terms, a brilliant piece of contract engineering. Lasker had created a situation where his opponent’s incentives were warped. It’s like a merger agreement where one party has to hit an absurd performance target to get their payout, forcing them to take wild risks.
Whether the two-point clause was real or not is almost beside the point. The ambiguity itself was a feature of the Lasker Franchise Model. He had turned the championship into a game where he set the rules, both on and off the board. His long-awaited match against the dogmatic Tarrasch was another masterclass. At the opening, Tarrasch grandly announced, “Mr. Lasker, I have only three words to say to you: check and mate!” Lasker responded by quietly dismantling him over the board, winning decisively. It was a victory of pragmatism over dogma, of the street fighter over the theoretician.
III: The Unified Field Theory of Struggle
So, was it all just psychological tricks and clever contracts? No. That’s the lazy explanation. The truth is deeper and weirder. Lasker’s chess, his mathematics, and his philosophy were all different expressions of a single, powerful idea.
1. The Chess: Modern analysis, aided by computers that feel no psychological pressure, has shown that Lasker’s “bad moves” were often incredibly profound. He understood concepts that his contemporaries had no words for. He knew that a strategic advantage could be converted into a tactical one, that an attack was the best defense, and that it was better to have a complicated position you understood than a simple one you didn’t.
His legendary 1914 win against the “invincible” Capablanca is the perfect example. Needing a win, Lasker chose a quiet, drawish opening. A psychological ploy? Yes, but it was more than that. It was a strategically brilliant choice that forced Capablanca, who only needed a draw, into a position where Black has to play actively and take risks to justify his setup. Lasker wasn’t just playing the man; he was playing a strategy perfectly calibrated to the tournament situation. He was a pioneer of practical, dynamic chess, and his ideas were so advanced they looked like mistakes to the untrained eye.
2. The Math: Away from the board, Lasker was a serious research mathematician. He earned his PhD in 1902 and proved a foundational theorem in commutative algebra, now known as the Lasker-Noether theorem. You don’t need to understand the details, but you need to understand the concept. The theorem provides a way to break down a complex abstract object (an “ideal”) into a unique combination of simpler, fundamental objects (“primary ideals”). It is, in essence, a method for finding the hidden structure within a complex system. Sound familiar?
3. The Philosophy: Lasker wrote several philosophical books, the most important of which was titled Kampf—“Struggle.” For him, struggle was the fundamental law of the universe. Life wasn’t a search for harmony or truth; it was a constant, dynamic fight. Progress was achieved not by avoiding conflict, but by engaging in it and winning.
This is the unified field theory of Emanuel Lasker. Whether he was looking at a chess game, a polynomial ring, or human society, he saw the same thing: a complex system defined by a dynamic struggle of competing forces. His genius was his ability to deconstruct that struggle, understand its components, and bend it to his will.
IV: The Board Gets Overturned
Lasker’s philosophy of struggle was not an academic abstraction. His own life was a harrowing journey through the greatest upheavals of the 20th century.
During World War I, he was a fervent German patriot. Convinced of victory, he invested his entire life savings—the fortune he had so carefully amassed as World Champion—in German war bonds. When Germany lost, they became worthless. He was wiped out.
This forced him back to the board, an aging champion playing for his survival. But worse was to come. In 1933, as a prominent German of Jewish heritage, he was forced to flee the Nazi regime. He and his wife Martha escaped with their lives, but the Nazis confiscated everything: their apartment, their farm, their savings. He was wiped out, again.
At 66 years old, he found refuge in the Soviet Union, where he was given a post at the Moscow Institute of Mathematics. In 1935, he staged a “biological miracle,” finishing third in a super-tournament in Moscow, ahead of his old rival Capablanca. But the Soviet haven soon became a trap. His patron was arrested and executed in Stalin’s Great Purge. Sensing the immense danger, the Laskers fled a totalitarian regime for the second time, escaping to the United States in 1937.
He arrived in New York, a two-time refugee, financially broke for the third time. He spent his final years giving chess lectures and exhibitions to support himself. He died in 1941 and was buried in Queens, not far from the grave of Wilhelm Steinitz, the man he had dethroned, who had also died in poverty.
V: The Verdict
Lasker’s true legacy is the introduction of a radical, modern idea into the heart of an ancient game. He understood that in any human contest, there are two systems at play: the formal system of rules (the pieces on the board) and the messy, irrational, emotional system of the human mind operating under pressure. His genius was to master both.
His friend Albert Einstein, a man who knew a thing or two about deep thinking, wrote of him
Emanuel Lasker was undoubtedly one of the most interesting people I came to know… I am not a chess expert and therefore not in a position to marvel at the force of mind revealed in his games. But I have to confess that I was very much impressed by his book Kampf