An incomparable project of intellectual biography and chess history has been completed.

Richard Forster, Michael Negele and Raj Tischbierek present the third volume of their monograph on Emanuel Lasker, the only German world chess champion to date.

Lasker became champion in 1896, defended his title for 27 years, which is still a record, and died in New York in 1941.

Jurgen Kaube

Editor.

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That sounds like a special life that can primarily attract interest from the history of sport.

Anyone who reads the 1400 pages or even just leafs through them to linger over individual chapters will see things differently.

Because we are confronted here with a biography that opens up a whole century.

More than twenty authors have discussed literally every aspect of Lasker's life and dug up every square inch of this terrain.

Born in 1868 in Berlinchen east of the Oder as the son of a Jewish cantor, Emanuel Lasker was not only an outstanding chess player, but also a mathematician of distinction, which is documented in the "Lasker-Noether theorem" about the decomposition of algebraic rings.

He quickly became a professional player and uniquely cultivated his combinatorial intelligence.

In addition to chess, he played and wrote about go, bridge, poker and other card games, invented his own board game, "Lasca", published philosophical works and a book on the psychology of games.

The first approaches to a mathematical game theory also go back to him.

All this is not only reported, but the readers receive an introduction to these matters.

One believes after reading

How much did a player like Lasker earn back then?

While at school in Berlin, Lasker was drawn to the chess cafes on Hackescher Markt and Leipziger Strasse.

His older brother Berthold, who later married the poet Else Schüler, which soon failed, dominated the scene, but soon concentrated on his profession as a doctor.

In 1890 Emanuel won his first major tournament in Breslau.

It was also the last tournament in the German Chess Federation in which he participated.

He became a professional player in England and North America, where he won the world championship title in 1894;

the steepest career anyone has ever had in this sport.

At that time chess was played in tournaments halfway around the world, but also in arranged two-player competitions over several games.

These depended on the particular prize pool, which was mostly raised by well-heeled fans, and this was also true of the world championship fights.

How much did a player like Lasker earn back then?

In today's dollars, 500 to 800 for a simultaneous match, 24,000 for winning the tournament in New York in 1924 and just under 200,000 dollars for the World Championship match against José Capablanca in Cuba in 1921, which cost Lasker the title.

As a purely professional player, he attached great importance to good pay, negotiated a lot, wrote chess columns about his tournaments for several newspapers, which he then compiled into books.

In Berlin he founded a "School of Intellectual Games" in his apartment, tried with moderate success

At that time, chess had stepped out of its coffee house era.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the romantic style of recklessness was replaced by players who analyzed the fight and subordinated it to principled points of view.

Wilhelm Steinitz, the first world champion, became the legislator of chess, Siegbert Tarrasch his law enforcement officer.

The latter in particular was about finding the fundamentally correct and “correct” move in every situation on the board.