Carl Schlechter


Carl Schlechter was a leading Austro-Hungarian chess master and theoretician at the turn of the 20th century. He is best known for drawing a World Chess Championship match with Emanuel Lasker.

Early life

Schlechter was born into a Catholic family in Vienna. He is sometimes deemed to be Jewish, although others dispute this. He began playing chess at the age of 13. His first and only teacher was an Austria-Hungarian chess problemist, Dr. Samuel Gold.
From 1893 onwards he played in over 50 international chess tournaments. He won or shared first at Munich 1900, Coburg 1904, Ostend 1906, Stockholm 1906, Vienna 1908, Prague 1908, Hamburg 1910, and thrice in the Trebitsch Memorial in Vienna.
Schlechter played several matches. He drew with Georg Marco in 1893, drew with Marco and Adolf Zinkl both in 1894, drew with Dawid Janowski in 1896, drew with Simon Alapin in 1899, beat Janowski in 1902, drew with Richard Teichmann in 1904, and drew with Siegbert Tarrasch in 1911.

Lasker–Schlechter match

In 1910 Schlechter played a match against Emanuel Lasker for the World Chess Championship. Schlechter was leading by one point going into the tenth and final game of the match. In the tenth game tragedy struck: after first achieving a won game, Schlechter blundered into a clearly drawn position, and then blundered again which led to his loss of the game. The match ended tied at 5–5 and Lasker retained his title. It is disputed as to whether Schlechter needed to score +2 to win the match and thus needed to win the tenth game. No contract for the match has ever been found and no evidence supporting this rumor has ever been produced. Schlechter distinguished himself as the first player in 16 years to seriously challenge Lasker's world title.

Later life

During World War I, he thrice won Trebitsch Memorial in Vienna. In the last year of his life, he took third in Vienna, lost a match to Akiba Rubinstein, took second place in Berlin, tied for third place in Kaschau, and took third place in Berlin. Schlechter died of pneumonia and starvation on 27 December 1918, and was buried in Budapest on 31 December 1918.

Assessment

The Carl Schlechter–Arthur Kaufmann–Hugo Fähndrich trio propagated the Viennese chess school, founded by Max Weiss in the 19th century.
Schlechter prepared the eighth and final edition of the famous Handbuch des Schachspiels openings treatise. Published in eleven parts between 1912 and 1916, it totaled 1,040 pages and included contributions by Rudolf Spielmann, Siegbert Tarrasch, and Richard Teichmann. International Master William Hartston called it "a superb work, perhaps the last to encase successfully the whole of chess knowledge within a single volume."
He was a typical example of a gentleman chess player of old, offering courteous draws to opponents who felt unwell. If his opponent arrived late for a game, Schlechter would inconspicuously subtract an equal amount of time from his own clock. He also mentored many of his rivals, including Oldřich Duras.

List of opening variations named after Schlechter

There are several "Schlechter Variations" in the chess openings:
The central character of the 1998 novel Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw by Thomas Glavinic is closely based on Schlechter. The book presents a fictionalised account of his 1910 World Chess Championship match with Lasker.