Edgard Colle: Caissa's Wounded Warrior

By Andy Soltis and Taylor Kingston

One of Caissa’s Brightest Stars!

The Belgian master Edgard Colle was one of the most dynamic and active chess players of the 1920s and early 1930s. Though his international career lasted only ten years, Colle played in more than 50 tournaments, as well as a dozen matches. Moreover, he played exciting and beautiful chess, full of life, vigor, imagination and creativity. As with such greats as Pillsbury and Charousek, it was a tragedy for the game that his life was cut short, at just age 34.

Author Taylor Kingston has examined hundreds of Colle’s games, in an effort to understand his skills and style, his strengths and weaknesses, and present an informed, balanced picture of him as a player. Colle emerges as a courageous, audacious, and tenacious fighter, who transcended the limitations his frail body imposed, to battle the giants of his day and topple many of them. 110 of Colle’s best, most interesting, and representative games have been given deep and exacting computer analysis. This often revealed important aspects completely overlooked by earlier annotators, and overturned their analytical verdicts. But the computer’s iron logic is tempered always with a sympathetic understanding that Colle played, in the best sense, a very human kind of chess.

Though not intended as a tutorial on the Colle System, the book has many instructive examples of that opening. Additionally, there is an extensive excerpt from Max Euwe’s Gedenkboek Colle, several other memorial tributes, biographical information about many of Colle’s opponents, his full known tournament and match record, and all his available tournament crosstables.

We invite the reader to get acquainted with this wounded but valiant warrior, whom Hans Kmoch called a “chess master with the body of a doomed man and the spirit of an immortal hero.”

About the Author:

Taylor Kingston has been a chess enthusiast since his teens. His historical articles have appeared in Chess Life, New In Chess, Inside Chess, Kingpin, and the website www.ChessCafe.com. He has edited numerous books for Russell Enterprises, most recently Emanuel Lasker: A Reader. He has also produced many computer-assisted analytical critiques of classic works by Alekhine, Capablanca, Euwe, Tartakower, Nimzovich, Najdorf, Fine and others. In this book, he combines history and analysis in a new look at one of the early 20th century’s most variable but brightest stars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Russell Enterprises, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949859287

Book preview

Openings

Author’s Preface

The spiritual precursor to this book is one of Fred Reinfeld’s lesser-known works, Colle’s Chess Masterpieces, first published in 1936. It was intended by that prolific American writer as a belated memorial tribute to Edgard Colle, who had died in 1932, and to make American readers more aware of the fine chess of the Belgian master, who had never played outside Europe. The publisher’s original idea was simply to reprint Reinfeld’s book with algebraic instead of descriptive notation, with this writer perhaps supplying a few gentle computer-assisted analytical corrections when it turned out Reinfeld had erred.

It soon became clear this approach would not do. Over the last several years I have done intensive computer-assisted analytical critiques of more than a dozen classic works from pre-computer days, by such greats as Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Euwe, Tal, Tartakower, Najdorf, Bronstein, Fine and others. These show that top-rank grandmasters, even world champions, can be quite fallible as annotators. Reinfeld was never in that class as a player, and in the 1930s, by his own admission, he was annotating about 500 games per year for various publications.* So when the unblinking stare of the lidless silicon eye was turned on his notes, mistakes were revealed like dental cavities by x-rays, of a number and degree unacceptable in a 21st-century chess book. Also, many of the games Reinfeld presented as masterpieces proved to be nothing of the sort; in some he was unaware that Colle made outright blunders and had lost positions. A few gentle corrections just would not be enough.

And of course in the 1930s Reinfeld did not have databases and web-sites with fingertip access to millions of games. Relatively few of Colle’s games appeared even in European publications outside the Low Countries, and even fewer in American magazines. In retrospect it’s remarkable that Reinfeld came up with the 51 games he had. Today the choice is much wider.

Therefore it was decided to write a completely new book. Some of the games Reinfeld chose are still included, and his notes are cited here and there, but for the most part the annotations are derived from careful analysis by the computer engines Stockfish 11 and Komodo 11.2.2. The final choices were made after many hours of combing through hundreds of Colle’s games – great, good, bad, and indifferent – trying to find the best and/or most interesting. While this was a time-consuming, eye-straining process, it was also edifying, for Colle played some exciting and beautiful chess, full of life, vigor, imagination and creativity. I came to have new respect and admiration for this small, frail man who could overcome the limitations his body imposed, and use his mind to grapple with and topple giants at the board. As his friend Hans Kmoch wrote, he was this chess master with the body of a doomed man and the spirit of an immortal hero.

Unlike most single-player game collections, this book is not organized chronologically, and is not intended as a biography or an account of Colle’s career. Rather, it is an exploration of his chess artistry and style, his strengths as a player, and also some frank looks at his weaknesses. Each of the first eight chapters in the games section focuses on an aspect of chess skill or a certain type of game: miniatures, brilliancies, lucky escapes, failures and near-misses, the endgame, positional play, rough-and-tumble fighting chess, and salvaging a late draw from a lost position. Within those chapters the games and/or fragments are in roughly increasing order of complexity and difficulty, regardless of when they were played. Chronology mattered only in the last chapter, which features Colle’s final game.

I could not have written his book without help. I want to acknowledge, first and foremost, Nikolaas Verhulst of Antwerp, whose website belgianchesshistory.be is a wonderful labor of love stocked with a huge amount of valuable information. Dr. Verhulst was always willing to answer questions, and was most gracious in providing several rare game scores, and parts of Max Euwe’s Gedenkboek Colle, the great Dutch champion’s memorial tribute to his friend, a book now very hard to find. Thanks to Jan van de Mortel for translating part of Euwe’s book. I also had assistance from historian Hans Renette, GM Hans Ree, and various colleagues from the Facebook group Chess Book Collectors: Martin van der Hidde, Dan Scoones, Stefan Be, et al. And my long-time friend Bo Simons, who is not a serious chess player, offered some helpful suggestions to make the book more interesting and accessible to the casual enthusiast. My thanks to all of them.

Taylor Kingston

San Diego

November 2020

________

* Book of the Warsaw 1935 International Chess Team Tournament by Reinfeld and Phillips (New York, 1936), page v.

Foreword

Mention Colle and a typical tournament player may respond: I played it as a kid but I outgrew it. It’s not much of an opening.

Mention the name to someone more knowledgeable and you could hear: He was a master, maybe a century ago. Won some pretty games. But he was pretty much a one-opening wonder.

Ask a third player and he could add: I remember some games of his. Nice ones, like his losses to Alekhine. Yeah, and when Capablanca refuted his opening.

That may be what many people recall. But it is hardly fair to someone who was once ranked number 14 in the world (which is about where players such as Hikaru Nakamura and Sergey Karjakin have been recently). So, let’s put Edgard Colle in the perspective he deserved.

He was born in 1897 and, like others of his generation, his prime years were delayed until after the Great War, when he was in his late 20s. This was a generation that grew up studying Paul Rudolf Bilguer’s Handbuch des Schachspiels. That book was the go-to database for roughly a century. After many revised editions, it had ballooned to about 1,000 pages.

By the 1920s, its analysis of the Queen’s Gambit Declined, the dominant opening of the day, often lasted to move 20. Aspiring students were told to memorize it. The ponderous variations indicated there was no room for improvement for either side after 1.d4! was met by 1…d5!. Chess was dying and the QGD was burying it.

Three players helped overthrow this notion. One was Aron Nimzovich, who advocated starting a game with 1.Nf3. Johannes Zukertort had done that in the 1880s but Nimzovich continued with the revolutionary 2.b3.

One of the many ironies of the Hypermoderns is that they were credited with freeing players from the rote-play of the QGD. White had to think about his opening moves. But Nimzovich created a system opening in which White could play his next moves with little or no thought. He could continue with 3.Bb2 and 4.e3. Then he could look at the Black side of the board and decide whether to play Bb5 or Be2, followed by castling.

The second player who challenged orthodoxy was Richard Réti. He had his own no-think opening. It began with 1.Nf3 and 2.c4 and often continued with 3.g3, 4.Bg2 and 5.0-0. Réti’s basic theme was to challenge Black on the light-colored squares, principally d5. Nimzovich’s idea, in contrast, was to exploit …d5 by occupying the dark center squares, principally e5.

Nimzovich and Réti didn’t want to add to the sum total of opening knowledge but to overthrow it. A member of the older generation, the great annotator Georg Marco, predicted that so much 1.d4 d5 analysis had been rendered obsolete by the Hypermoderns that the next edition of Bilguer would be only eight pages long.

What is forgotten today is that there was a third innovator who was advocating his own opening of semi-automatic moves to replace the QGD. This was Colle and the Colle System.

It was another no-think opening. White could play 1.d4, 2.Nf3, 3.e3 followed in some order by Bd3, Nbd2, c2-c3 and 0-0. He looked for the right moment to advance e3-e4 and seek a kingside attack.

This looks naive but the Colle System slowly won adherents among the master class. They were as diverse as the speculative Savielly Tartakower and orthodox Géza Maróczy. But what about that game with Capablanca? Did the Cuban really refute the Colle System?

Well, at Karlsbad 1929 he showed that it mattered a lot what Black did in the first moves. Colle was the one playing for equality after 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 b6 3.e3 Bb7 4.Nbd2 e6 5.Bd3 c5 6.0-0 Nc6 7.c3 Be7 and now 8.e4 cxd4 9.Nxd4 0-0 10.Qe2 Ne5!.

But this was not a refutation. It just showed that the Colle System moves couldn’t be played automatically against any Black move order. This fact was important, but it did not discourage Colle’s companions in international chess. There were many more masters adopting the system after the Capablanca game, including Alexander Alekhine, Salo Flohr, Paul Keres and Sultan Khan.

Several major openings were popularized during the 1920s, the greatest era of innovation. Some, like the Alekhine’s Defense and Grünfeld Defense and Tartakower’s Catalan Opening, are standard today.

But 1.Nf3 and 2.c4 has become more of a transpositional device than a real opening. Réti’s connection to it is often forgotten. (1.Nf3 is sometimes listed as Zukertort’s Opening in databases. Maybe Kramnik’s Opening is more appropriate.) Nimzovich’s 1.Nf3 and 2.b3 is so rare at the master level that even Magnus Carlsen shuns it. And he plays everything.

But the Colle System remains a remarkably vibrant dinosaur. It is played by Levon Aronian, Karjakin, Wesley So, Vladimir Kramnik, Anish Giri – and, of course, the world champion.

As a player, Colle was ranked in the world’s top 20 by 1924. He fell back, but then enjoyed his peak period in the 1930s. When he died, he was number 20, according to retroactive analysis by Chessmetrics.com.

He scored victories over Max Euwe (several times), Akiba Rubinstein, Yefim Bogoljubow, Ernst Grünfeld, Rudolf Spielmann and Frank Marshall. He played in many of the strongest tournaments of his era, such as Baden Baden 1925, Karlsbad 1929, San Remo 1930, and Bled 1931.

Why then is Colle forgotten as a player today? The main reason, of course, is that he died at age 34. We can’t know how much he could have achieved if he had been healthy and survived into the golden age that was 1930s chess.

But we can make some more comparisons. If Richard Réti had also died at 34, he could be remembered for 1.Nf3 and little else. We might never have read Modern Ideas in Chess, for example, or seen his great 1.Nf3 victories at New York 1924. If Aron Nimzovich had died at 34, we would never have seen My System or appreciated how the Nimzo-Indian and Queen’s Indian came about. They also died young but not nearly as young as Colle.

Fate has cheated chess out of much of the greatness of many players, from Harry Pillsbury to Leonid Stein and Vugar Gashimov. We should be thankful that we get to remember Edgard Colle.

Andy Soltis

New York

November 2020

Annotation Symbols

Frequently Used Abbreviations

CC: chess club

CF: chess federation

Ch: championship

(D): see next diagram

FIDE: Fédération Internationale des Échecs, i.e., the International Chess Federation

GM: grandmaster

IM: international master

m: match game

SK: Shaakclub (Dutch for chess club)

WCh: world championship

WSZ: Wiener Schachzeitung (Vienna Chess Magazine)

Edgard Colle

1897-1932

Part I

Biographical Basics, Historical Background, Colleagues’ Reminiscences, and Memorial Tributes

While material about Colle’s chess career is readily available, personal information about him proved remarkably scarce in the sources available to us. Jeremy Gaige’s Chess Personalia says he was born in Ghent, Belgium, on May 18, 1897, and that he died there on April 20, 1932, though other sources say he died on the 19th. The website Schaak Academie Colle says he won the Ghent city championship in 1917, and from 1918 on was a regular at Le Cercle des Échecs de Bruxelles, where he trained with the then well-known Belgian master Max Nebel.* The Oxford Companion to Chess tells us he was Belgian Champion six times between 1922 and 1929. An article by Edward Winter, Where Did They Live?, gives his address as 71 rue du Congo, Ghent, Belgium as of 1925.** Various sources report that he worked as a journalist. His first language was Dutch (there is no Belgian language per se). He suffered from a chronic gastric ulcer condition that ultimately killed him. Beyond that, there was little we could find; nothing on his family background, his education, how he fared in World War I, what publications he worked for, his religious or political views, etc. A definitive biography of Colle would require extensive research in European archives, something this writer’s circumstances don’t permit.

We can give some background on the times Colle lived in. Tensions between the great European powers – Britain, France, Russia, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire – had been steadily building in the early 1900s, along with their levels of military armament. Small countries such as Belgium could only pray a major war would not come, but of course in 1914 it did. Colle was only age 17 when on August 4th the German army, in a blatant violation of Belgian neutrality, advanced through his country, soon adopting a deliberate policy of terror against civilians to suppress resistance. By the time French and British forces halted Germany’s western advance at the Battle of the Marne in September, most of Belgium was under German occupation, and would remain so until late 1918.

The occupation was particularly hard on Ghent, as the Germans quartered about 12,000 troops there, confiscated foodstuffs and raw materials, closed down or took over factories, severely limited civilian travel, conscripted nearly 12,000 men for forced labor (about 20% of the able-bodied male population), took away all bicycles, stripped the entire city of anything made of copper, nickel, pewter or other useable metal, looted churches and museums for their art treasures, curtailed freedom of the press, censored mail, summarily shot suspected spies and saboteurs, and enforced curfews and other harsh restrictions. Thousands in Ghent, and millions in Belgium, might have starved were it not for food shipped from overseas, much of it by the Commission for Relief in Belgium, organized by future U.S. President Herbert Hoover. An influenza epidemic struck in February 1917.*** One presumes Colle was not among those conscripted or taken ill, and some semblance of normal life must have still gone on, as when he won the Ghent city chess championship in 1917.

Finally in November 1918, the war ended and Europe started rebuilding. The bellicose German monarchy, along with the empires of Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey, no longer existed. New nations such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia sprang up from their remains. Belgium returned to self-rule and its pre-war borders, with a small piece of German territory (Eupen-Malmédy) added.

International chess activity, naturally much reduced during the war, started up again. There was a changing of the guard at the top in 1921, when J.R. Capablanca took the world championship from Emanuel Lasker, who had held it since 1894. Of masters prominent before the war, some (notably Schlechter) had died, others – e.g. Janowski, Tarrasch, Maróczy, Mieses, Teichmann, Bernstein, Marco, Burn, Duras – had declined or retired, while still others, such as Rubinstein, Spielmann, Réti, Marshall, Tartakower and Vidmar, pretty much picked up where they left off.

As radically new artistic movements – Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Dada, Bauhaus, etc. – arose or revived after the war to challenge established precepts in painting, sculpture, cinema, architecture and other fields, so also in chess came a flood of new ideas that invigorated the game at a time when some were saying it faced the death of the draw due to technique and book theory becoming common knowledge. Historian R.N. Coles wrote about this in Dynamic Chess (1966)****:

Although Capablanca’s great virtuosity temporarily reprieved the classical style, the signs of reaction were apparent even before he came upon the scene. The principle of keeping the draw in hand and the consequent difficulty of forcing a win created among the chess-loving public a distaste for the methods employed, with their lack of breath-taking risks brilliantly overcome and their tendency to produce an ever-increasing number of dull draws; even the won games were won in a manner which excited little enthusiasm in the breasts of the amateurs, on whose support the chess masters depended for the cash prizes for which they competed.

The tournament promoters who had to find the cash prizes were the first to sense the need for a change … [Fortunately] new forces were at work. A younger generation of masters, gifted with a natural ability to find their way through more complicated positions than those normally associated with the classical style, realized that it was in its essential simplicity that the sterility of the classical style lay.

This younger generation, masters such as Nimzovich, Réti, Breyer, Alekhine, Bogoljubow and Grünfeld, challenged the classical principles which, through the influential writings of Siegbert Tarrasch, had been the prevailing dogma of pre-WW1 chess. Dubbed hypermoderns by Tartakower, these innovative players developed new openings, new ideas on how to develop pieces and control the center, new strategic approaches, and in general a more complex and dynamic style of play. The pages of chess books and periodicals were full of heated debates between partisans of the contending schools.

It was this turbulent milieu that Colle entered when he started serious international play in the early 1920s. While he was not a major innovator in opening theory like Nimzovich or Réti, nor as ardently hypermodern in his approach as they, he made his own original contributions, especially with his signature Colle System. More importantly, his sharp, energetic style was a breath of fresh air, in clear contrast to the cold, endgame-oriented classical technique of a Capablanca or Rubinstein.

Thus he was the kind of player prized by the tournament promoters Coles referred to. Unlike some egotistical masters, he was never difficult to deal with, and his style was popular with chess fans. Thus he got many tournament invitations: more than 50 in a period spanning barely ten years! From about 1923 through 1931, Colle, Yates, Tartakower and Spielmann seemed to be in almost every important European tournament. Organizers could count on exciting games from them, and on paying customers wanting to watch them in action.

Such, insofar as a brief sketch permits, was the historical context of Colle’s chess career. For more about him as a person, we turn to excerpts from Euwe’s Gedenkboek Colle, and memorial tributes by Hans Kmoch, Fred Reinfeld, and the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad. While these don’t tell the story of Colle’s life, they give brief glimpses of it, and insights into his personality, which by all accounts was warm-hearted, gentlemanly, pleasant and positive, and his character, which was strong, decent and honorable.

Gedenkboek Colle

by Max Euwe

In 1932 the Dutch chess master and future world champion Max Euwe wrote this book as a memorial tribute to Edgard Colle, who had been both a frequent adversary at the board, and a close friend. Published in Dutch and French, it included Euwe’s personal reminiscences, and fifty annotated games. We present here excerpts from pages 10 to 35, provided to us by Nikolaas Verhulst and translated from Dutch by IM Jan van de Mortel.

Historical Overview of Colle’s Results and Style

In 1923 Edgard Colle broke through internationally when he represented Belgium for the first time abroad. Until that time his development was unremarkable, winning the local championship of the city of Ghent in 1917 and later the Belgium national championship in 1922 (ahead of Koltanowski). Boruchowitz had just edged him out for the title in 1921, but a year later no one doubted Colle’s superiority.

Colle’s international trial by fire came in a short match with Znosko-Borovsky played in Brussels in 1922. He lost all six games! In hindsight this result was not so surprising. Colle was a man of extremes. He lacked the technical skills of an international master and the ability to minimize the effects of his shortcomings. On the contrary, he managed to express his shortcomings to their fullest, with fatal results in each game. Incidentally, this is the best method to learn from your mistakes, a method that soon started to bear fruit for Colle, as we will see.

After a respectable result in the B-Tournament at Ramsgate (Paschen 1923) [sic; actually the Margate