Wilhelm Steinitz: The 'Pickpocket' Who Became First World Chess Champion

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Wilhelm Steinitz was born in 1836 in the Jewish ghetto of Prague, the youngest of 13 sons of a tailor, and studied the Talmud before learning chess at about 12. In 1857 he went to study mathematics at the Vienna Polytechnic, and by the early 1860s he was the strongest player in Austria. He moved to London, turned professional and played the attacking romantic style well enough to be called the Austrian Morphy. In 1866 he beat Adolf Anderssen eight wins to six with no draws. Then he rebuilt his game, and at the 1873 Vienna tournament he unveiled positional play: pawn structure, weak squares and small advantages that compound, which brought a 25-game winning streak and charges of cowardice.

From 1873 to 1882 he largely left tournaments to write for The Field, dissecting rivals' games in an ink war with Johannes Zukertort's camp, and in 1883 moved to New York and founded the International Chess Magazine. In 1886 he met Zukertort in a match explicitly for the championship of the world, played in New York, St. Louis and New Orleans. Down 4 to 1, he won 12.5 to 7.5. He defended against Mikhail Chigorin, lost the title in 1894 to Emanuel Lasker, 32 years younger, and lost a 1896 rematch in Moscow. He died a pauper in 1900 in the Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island.

• Anderssen likened another player to a highwayman with a pistol, but called Steinitz a pickpocket who steals a single pawn.
• Zukertort won only one of the final 15 games of the 1886 match.
• Steinitz insisted the American flag stand by his board during the match.
• He lost his first wife, Caroline, and their daughter, Flora, and spent 40 days in a Moscow sanatorium playing chess with inmates.
• Lasker later wrote that he felt a duty to avenge the wrongs Steinitz had suffered.