Edward Lasker was a leading German-American

German American

German Americans are citizens of the United States of German ancestry and comprise about 51 million people, or 17% of the U.S. population, the country's largest self-reported ancestral group...

 chess

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

 and Go player. He was awarded the title of International Master of chess by FIDE. Lasker was an engineer

Engineer

An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality,...

 by profession, and an author.

Background

Edward (then Eduard) Lasker was born in Kempen

Kepno

Kępno is a town in Poland. It lies on the outskirts of the Greater Poland Voivodeship, as it borders on Silesia and the Łódz Land, at the crossing point of two transport routes: north to south and east to west . As of December 31, 2009 Kępno had a population of 14,760...

 (Kępno), Province of Posen

Province of Posen

The Province of Posen was a province of Prussia from 1848–1918 and as such part of the German Empire from 1871 to 1918. The area was about 29,000 km2....

 (Greater Poland), Prussia

Prussia

Prussia was a German kingdom and historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army. Prussia shaped the history...

, German Empire

German Empire

The German Empire refers to Germany during the "Second Reich" period from the unification of Germany and proclamation of Wilhelm I as German Emperor on 18 January 1871, to 1918, when it became a federal republic after defeat in World War I and the abdication of the Emperor, Wilhelm II.The German...

, (present Poland). He studied in Breslau (Wrocław) and in Charlottenburg

Charlottenburg

Charlottenburg is a locality of Berlin within the borough of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, named after Queen consort Sophia Charlotte...

 (now part of Berlin). Before World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 he moved first to London, England, and then, in 1914 shortly after the outbreak of war, to America, the birthplace of his mother. He found a job in Chicago. When America entered the war in 1917, he was sent enlistment papers, but with the right of exemption as a German. He waived his right to exemption, which he said would make his American citizenship be granted more quickly; however, the war was over before he was called up to military service.

Engineering career

Lasker earned undergraduate degrees at the Technical College of Charlottenburg

Technical University of Berlin

The Technische Universität Berlin is a research university located in Berlin, Germany. Translating the name into English is discouraged by the university, however paraphrasing as Berlin Institute of Technology is recommended by the university if necessary .The TU Berlin was founded...

 in Mechanical

Mechanical engineering

Mechanical engineering is a discipline of engineering that applies the principles of physics and materials science for analysis, design, manufacturing, and maintenance of mechanical systems. It is the branch of engineering that involves the production and usage of heat and mechanical power for the...

 and Electrical Engineering

Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...

. In 1921–23, he invented a mechanical breast pump

Breast pump

A breast pump is a mechanical device that extracts milk from the breasts of a lactating woman. Breast pumps may be manual devices powered by hand or foot movements or electrical devices powered by mains electricity or batteries.- History :...

, which saved many premature infants' lives and made Lasker a lot of money, although it caused his friends to refer to him facetiously as "the chest player".

Chess

His chess teacher in Breslau was Arnold Schottländer

Arnold Schottländer

Arnold Schottländer was a German chess master.Born in Münsterberg , Silesia, he was one of the chess pupils of Adolf Anderssen....

. In Berlin, he won the City Championship (1909) and wrote his first chess book titled Chess Strategy (Schachstrategie, 1911) which had many English and German editions.

Lasker published several books on American checkers

English draughts

English draughts or checkers , also called American checkers or straight checkers or in Israel damka, is a form of draughts board game. Unlike international draughts, it is played on an eight by eight squared board with twelve pieces on each side...

, chess

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

, and Go

Go (board game)

Go , is an ancient board game for two players that originated in China more than 2,000 years ago...

. He won five U.S. Open Chess Championship

U.S. Open Chess Championship

The U.S. Open Championship is an open national chess championship that has been held in the United States annually since 1900.-History:Through 1938, the tournaments were organized by the Western Chess Association and its successor, the American Chess Federation .The United States Chess Federation ...

s (1916, 1917, 1919, 1920, 1921); this tournament was known at the time as the Western Open. His best result was his narrow 8½–9½ loss in a match with Frank Marshall for the U.S. Championship in 1923. For that, Lasker was invited to participate in the legendary New York 1924 chess tournament

New York 1924 chess tournament

New York 1924 was an elite chess tournament held in the Alamac Hotel in New York City from March 6 to April 18, 1924. It was organized by the Manhattan Chess Club. The competitors included world champion José Raúl Capablanca and his predecessor Emanuel Lasker. Nine other top players from Europe...

, facing world-class masters like Alekhine

Alexander Alekhine

Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine was the fourth World Chess Champion. He is often considered one of the greatest chess players ever.By the age of twenty-two, he was already among the strongest chess players in the world. During the 1920s, he won most of the tournaments in which he played...

, Capablanca

José Raúl Capablanca

José Raúl Capablanca y Graupera was a Cuban chess player who was world chess champion from 1921 to 1927. One of the greatest players of all time, he was renowned for his exceptional endgame skill and speed of play...

, Emanuel Lasker

Emanuel Lasker

Emanuel Lasker was a German chess player, mathematician, and philosopher who was World Chess Champion for 27 years...

, and Réti

Richard Réti

Réti composed one of the most famous chess studies, shown in this diagram. It was published in Ostrauer Morgenzeitung 4 December 1921. It seems impossible for the white king to catch the advanced black pawn, while the white pawn can be easily stopped by the black king...

. He finished tenth out of eleven players, but many of his games were competitive; Lasker was the only chess amateur in a very strong field of professionals.

His most famous game is probably the queen sacrifice and king hunt against Sir George Thomas

George Alan Thomas

Sir George Alan Thomas, Bart. was a British badminton, tennis and chess player. He was twice British Chess Champion and a 21-time All-England Badminton champion. He also played in the semi-finals of the men's tennis doubles at Wimbledon in 1911...

. After Lasker checkmated him, Thomas said, "This was very nice." Lasker, who had yet to learn English, was touched by Thomas's sportsmanship after a spectator translated Thomas's remark into German for him. Lasker wrote that had he won the game against a leading Berlin amateur, his opponent would likely have told him, "You are just lucky! Had I played [10...Bxe5] instead of [...Qe7], you would have been lost."

Although Lasker never won against Capablanca, he drew

Draw (chess)

In chess, a draw is when a game ends in a tie. It is one of the possible outcomes of a game, along with a win for White and a win for Black . Usually, in tournaments a draw is worth a half point to each player, while a win is worth one point to the victor and none to the loser.For the most part,...

 as Black against him at the 1924 New York tournament. Lasker was not usually so fortunate; for example, Capablanca once arrived one minute before he would have forfeited the game for late arrival, at New York 1915, and Lasker played the Riga variation of the Ruy Lopez

Ruy Lopez

The Ruy Lopez, also called the Spanish Opening or Spanish Game, is a chess opening characterised by the moves:-History:The opening is named after the 16th century Spanish priest Ruy López de Segura, who made a systematic study of this and other openings in the 150-page book on chess Libro del...

 with which he had some experience, but Capablanca found an advantageous continuation over-the-board.

Lasker lived on the Upper West Side

Upper West Side

The Upper West Side is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, New York City, that lies between Central Park and the Hudson River and between West 59th Street and West 125th Street...

 of New York City until his death in 1981.

He was friends with former World Champion Emanuel Lasker. Edward wrote in his memoirs of the New York 1924 tournament as published in the March 1974 edition of Chess Life magazine: "I did not discover that we were actually related until he (Emanuel Lasker) told me shortly before his death that someone had shown him a Lasker family tree on one of whose branches I was dangling." In a February 8, 1973 letter to Robert B. Long, Lasker explained their exact relationship:

The genealogy, incidentally, indicates that the common forbear of Emanuel and myself was the son Samuel Lasker of the Rabbi of the Polish village Lask, whose name was originally Meier Hindels. However, later the additional name Lasker was given to him to distinguish him from another Meier Hindels also living in Lask. Samuel Lasker moved to another Polish village, Kepno, in 1769, after it had been captured by Frederick the Great and became a German township, and I am the last descendant of his who was born there. He was the greatgrandfather of my greatgrandfather. His first-born son left Kepmen [sic-Kempen] and moved to Jarotschin, another Polish village, and Emanuel Lasker was that one's greatgrandson.

Go

Lasker was deeply impressed by Go. He first read about it in a magazine article by Korschelt which suggested Go as a rival to chess, a claim that he found amusing. Later on his interest was piqued again when he noticed the record of a Go game on the back of a Japanese newspaper being read by a customer of a cafe where they played chess. He and his friend Max Lange (not to be confused with the more famous chess player with the same name

Max Lange

Max Lange was a German chess player and composer.In 1858–1864, he was an editor of the Deutsche Schachzeitung . He was a founder of Westdeutscher Schachbund , and an organizer of the 9th DSB–Congress at Leipzig 1894...

) took the paper after he had left, and deciphered the diagram, but the game was not complete. The position led them to assume that the notation under the game would indicate a Black victory, but being unable to read Japanese, they had to ask another Japanese customer at the cafe. To their surprise, it was a resignation by Black. Only after three weeks of study was Max Lange able to understand the reason for White's victory. This experience led them to a deeper appreciation for the game, and they studied it in earnest, but were unable to interest other chess players.

After two years, Emanuel Lasker, then the world chess champion, returned to Germany from the United States. When Edward told him that he had found a game to rival chess, he was skeptical, but after being told the rules, and playing one game, he understood that Go was strategically deep. They started studying Go with Yasugoro Kitabatake, a Japanese student, and after two years were able to beat him with no handicap.

Kitabatake arranged a game for Edward, Emanuel, and Emanuel's brother Berthold, against a visiting Japanese mathematician, and strong Go player. The Laskers took a nine-stone handicap, and played in consultation with each other, considering their moves deeply, but their opponent beat them effortlessly and without taking much time to think. After the game, Emanuel suggested to Edward that they travel to Tokyo to study Go. In 1911, Edward got a job at AEG. After a year at the company, he tried to get transferred to the Tokyo office, but as the company only posted fluent English speakers in Tokyo, he went to work in England first. He was detained there during the early part of World War I, and never made it to Tokyo. He was, however, given permission to travel to the United States by Sir Haldane Porter, a highly-ranked Foreign Office mandarin, who remembered that he had won the London chess championship in May 1914. Lasker was instrumental in developing Go in the U.S., and together with Karl Davis Robinson and Lee Hartman founded the American Go Association

American Go Association

The American Go Association was founded in 1935 to promote the board game of Go in the United States. Founded by chess master Edward Lasker and some friends at Chumley's restaurant in New York City, the AGA is one of the oldest Western Go associations...

.

Books

• Chess Strategy 1915 (second edition)
• Chess and Checkers: the Way to Mastership 1918
• Go and Go-Moku, 1934 (2nd ed. 1960).
• Chess for Fun and Chess for Blood, 1942 (2nd ed.), ISBN 0-486-20146-5.
• The Adventure of Chess, 1949 (2nd ed. 1959), ISBN 0-486-20510-X.
• Chess Secrets I Learned from the Masters (semi-autobiographical and instructional) (1951, 1969) ISBN 0-486-22266-7.

Quotes

• "It has been said that man is distinguished from animal in that he buys more books than he can read. I should like to suggest that the inclusion of a few chess books would help to make the distinction unmistakable." – The Adventure of Chess
• "While the Baroque rules of Chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of Go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go."

Notable games

Ed. Lasker vs. Sir George Thomas, 1912

This is Lasker's most famous game, and one of the most famous games of all time.

Ed. Lasker–Sir George Thomas

George Alan Thomas

Sir George Alan Thomas, Bart. was a British badminton, tennis and chess player. He was twice British Chess Champion and a 21-time All-England Badminton champion. He also played in the semi-finals of the men's tennis doubles at Wimbledon in 1911...

, London 1912 (offhand clock game):

1. d4 e6 2. Nf3 f5 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bg5 Be7 5. Bxf6 Bxf6 6. e4 fxe4 7. Nxe4 b6 8. Ne5 0-0 9. Bd3 Bb7 10. Qh5!? Qe7?? (see first diagram)

10...Bxe5! 11.Qxe5 Nc6 or 11.dxe5 Rf5 wins a pawn.

11. Qxh7+!! Kxh7 12. Nxf6+ Kh6

12...Kh8 13.Ng6#.

13. Neg4+ Kg5 14. h4+

14.f4+ also forces mate, more rapidly if 14...Kxf4 15.g3+ Kg5 16.h4# or 15...Kf3

14... Kf4 15. g3+ Kf3 16. Be2+

16.0-0 or 16.Kf1, with the threat 17.Nh2# as a quicker mate.

16... Kg2 17. Rh2+ Kg1 18. Kd2# 1–0 (see second diagram)

External links

• Excerpt from "My Go Career" By Dr. Edward Lasker (Go review 1961, No. 9)
• Edward Winter
  Edward Winter (chess historian)
  Edward Winter is an English journalist, archivist, historian, collector and author about the game of chess. He writes a regular column on that subject, Chess Notes, and is also a regular columnist for ChessBase.-Chess Notes:...
  
  , Chaos in a Miniature
• Go in America, a history of the American Go Association
• How Go came to America