's Josefov district The book of the
Hastings 1895 chess tournament, written collectively by the players, described Steinitz as follows: Mr. Steinitz stands high as a theoretician and as a writer; he has a powerful pen, and when he chooses can use expressive English. He evidently strives to be fair to friends and foes alike, but appears sometimes to fail to see that after all he is much like many others in this respect. Possessed of a fine intellect, and extremely fond of the game, he is apt to lose sight of all other considerations, people and business alike. Chess is his very life and soul, the one thing for which he lives.
Influence on the game Steinitz's play up to and including 1872 was similar to that of his contemporaries: sharp, aggressive, and full of
sacrificial play. This was the style in which he became "world number one" by beating
Adolf Anderssen in 1866 and confirmed his position by beating
Zukertort in 1872 and winning the 1872 London International tournament (Zukertort had claimed the rank of number two by beating Anderssen in 1871). Steinitz's successor as world champion,
Emanuel Lasker, summed up the new style as: "In the beginning of the game ignore the search for
combinations, abstain from violent moves, aim for small advantages, accumulate them, and only after having attained these ends search for the combination – and then with all the power of will and intellect, because then the combination must exist, however deeply hidden." Although Steinitz's play changed abruptly, he said he had been thinking along such lines for some years: Some of the games which I saw
Paulsen play during the London Congress of 1862 gave a still stronger start to the modification of my own opinions, which has since developed, and I began to recognize that Chess genius is not confined to the more or less deep and brilliant finishing strokes after the original balance of power and position has been overthrown, but that it also requires the exercise of still more extraordinary powers, though perhaps of a different kind to maintain that balance or respectively to disturb it at the proper time in one's own favor. and in 1889 he edited the book of the great
New York 1889 tournament (won by
Mikhail Chigorin and
Max Weiss), in which he did not compete as the tournament was designed to produce his successor as World Champion. But when he contested the first World Championship match in 1886 against
Johannes Zukertort, it became evident that Steinitz was playing on another level. Although Zukertort was at least Steinitz's equal in spectacular attacking play, Steinitz often outmaneuvered him fairly simply by the use of positional principles. By the time of his match in 1890–91 against Gunsberg, some commentators showed an understanding of and appreciation for Steinitz's theories. Shortly before the 1894 match with Emanuel Lasker, even the
New York Times, which had earlier published attacks on his play and character, paid tribute to his playing record, the importance of his theories, and his sportsmanship in agreeing to the most difficult match of his career despite his previous intention of retiring. By the end of his career, Steinitz was more highly esteemed as a theoretician than as a player. The comments about him in the book of the Hastings 1895 chess tournament focus on his theories and writings, Lasker, who took the championship from Steinitz, wrote, "I who vanquished him must see to it that his great achievement, his theories should find justice, and I must avenge the wrongs he suffered."
Writings Steinitz was the main chess correspondent of
The Field (in London) from 1873 to 1882, and used this to present his ideas about chess strategy. He wrote the book of the 1889 New York tournament, in which he annotated all 432 of the games, Steinitz also allegedly wrote a pamphlet entitled
Capital, Labor, and Charity while confined at
River Crest Sanitarium in New York during the final months of his life.
Chessmetrics places him only 15th on its all-time list. Chessmetrics penalizes players who play infrequently; opportunities for competitive chess were infrequent in Steinitz's best years, Between his victory over Anderssen (1866) and his loss to Emanuel Lasker (1894), Steinitz won all his "normal" matches, sometimes by wide margins; and his worst tournament performance in that 28-year period was third place in Paris (1867). The Edo rating system that covers the years from 1821 to 1937 places Steinitz 3rd in top peak rating; behind Jose Capablanca and Paul Morphy but ahead of Emanuel Lasker and Alexander Alekhine. Initially Steinitz played in the all-out attacking style of contemporaries like Anderssen, and then changed to the positional style with which he dominated competitive chess in the 1870s and 1880s. However, he retained his capacity for brilliant attacks right to the end of his career; for example, in the
1895 Hastings tournament (when he was 59), he beat
von Bardeleben in a spectacular game in which in the closing stages Steinitz deliberately exposed all his pieces to attack simultaneously (except his king, of course). He was aware of his own tendencies and said early in his career, "Nothing would induce me to take charge of a chess column ...Because I should be so fair in dispensing blame as well as praise that I should be sure to give offence and make enemies." When he embarked on chess journalism, his brutally frank review of Wormald's
The Chess Openings in 1875 proved him right on both counts. and the Cuban and Russian chess communities. He could poke fun at some of his own rhetoric; for example: "I remarked that I would rather die in America than live in England. ... I added that I would rather lose a match in America than win one in England. But after having carefully considered the subject in all its bearings, I have come to the conclusion that I neither mean to die yet nor to lose the match." Although he had a strong sense of honour about repaying debts, Steinitz was poor at managing his finances: he let a competitor "poach" many of his clients in 1862–63, offered to play the 1886 world title match against
Johannes Zukertort for free, and died in poverty in 1900, leaving his widow to survive by running a small shop. ==Competitive record==