I gave a lecture at the club a while ago about Rudolf Spielmann, chessplayer from the early 20th century who, flawed as he was, has always been a role model for me. (In fact, when you consider that the two biggest influences on my chess style have been Spielmann and Bronstein, perhaps you will understand better why I play the moves I play.)

But one thing I never got around to mentioning was an often overlooked portion of his legacy to modern-day players. I’m speaking of Vladimir Vukovic.

Vukovic wrote two volumes that are priceless to developing players: The Chess Sacrifice and The Art Of Attack. While the latter volume is still getting reprinted widely, acclaimed as a classic in the field, the other often gets ignored.

It builds off of Spielmann’s own The Art of Sacrifice in Chess, covering in more detail the area of “real” sacrifices, as Spielmann termed them (as opposed to “sham” or “pseudo” sacrifices, where the material given up must immediately be returned).

Spielmann’s work was the first to try and categorize sacrifices, and Vukovic built on that as well. Since virtually all current works on the theory of sacrifices and combinations can be traced back to the work of one of these two writers, and Vukovic himself acknowledges his debt to Spielmann, we have to conclude that we owe our current approach to sacrifices and combinations to this great Austrian player.

And for that, we doubly give thanks for Rudolf Spielmann. Without him the literature of chess would be much the poorer.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 9:55 am and is filed under Chess History, General Chess. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.