chess history

Mickey Adams is the fourth highest rated player playing in Gibraltar. He is a former winner, having tied with eight(!) others on 7½/10 in 2010 and then won the play-off. Mickey comes to Gibraltar on the crest of a wave (well, not literally – I expect he is flying in like everyone else). At the recent London Classic he finished an excellent third equal after Carlsen and Kramnik, and with a win against world champion Vishy Anand to his credit. In the process he wrested back his status as England’s highest rated player from Luke McShane. At 2725 he is the only English player currently above the elite 2700 threshold. This will be his fifth Gibraltar tournament. Mickey almost personifies the Rock: he has only lost one game of the 39 classical games he has played here.

‘The following story, no less delightful for probably being apochryphal [sic], conveys Chotimirsky’s qualities admirably: in the St Petersburg tournament of 1909, Chotimirsky defeated both Emanuel Lasker and Rubinstein .. and managed to come 13th in a field of 19. Regarding his win against Lasker, it is said that he infuriated the world champion by pretending to be deeply absorbed in a Japanese translation of Also Sprach Zarathustra during their game.’

The article was reproduced in Reinfeld’s The Treasury of Chess Lore (New York, 1951); see page 161.
The anecdote also appeared (‘There is a story to the effect that ...’, but with no mention of Japanese) on page 131 of another Reinfeld book, The Great Chess Masters and Their Games (New York, 1952). And again on page 82 of a further Reinfeld work, How to Play Winning Chess (New York, 1962):

‘The story is told that during the course of his game with Emanuel Lasker (the world champion) in the St Petersburg tournament of 1909, Chotimirsky read a Japanese translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra. Legend has it that the world champion was so incensed at the young man’s studied insolence that he lost the game. Whatever the cause of his defeat, Lasker was singularly reticent about this encounter.’

Two or three years later Lasker made some remarks about Dus-Chotimirsky in an item in the New YorkEvening Post, as related on page 67 of the March 1912 American Chess Bulletin, but there was no reference to their game in St Petersburg or to the episode so flimsily recounted by Reinfeld (‘It is said that ...’, ‘There is a story to the effect that ...’, ‘The story is told that ...’ and ‘Legend has it that ...’).