A Century of Chess: Oldrich Duras (from 1910-1919)

Out of everybody of the classical era, Duras is my favorite player. I really didn’t know much about him before I started the series - he’s sort of receded from chess history - but, more than any player I can think of before Tal, he had the capacity to create magic on the board.
In my previous post on him, I’ve gushed enough about him, so here I’ll just cover the anti-climactic end of his career. Duras ‘came up’ with the Barmen Generation and with Rubinstein and for a while was Rubinstein’s chief rival. After 1908, though, his results started to decline, and in the 1910s he went from being a viable world championship candidate to a second-tier grandmaster. At Hamburg 1910, he was on track to win after defeating Carl Schlechter but after a late-round “accident” against the outsider - had to settle for second. He did well at Abbazia and Bad Pistyan in 1912 and was shared first at Breslau, but at San Sebastián 1911 he was second-from-last, and in the middle of the pack at Karlsbad 1911 and San Sebastián 1912. His world travels in 1913 were the excuse for a string of tournaments - quadrangular tournaments in St Petersburg and New York and a short match with Marshall, but Duras lost to Marshall and won none of the events that were, essentially, held for him. It’s a bit difficult to understand what happened with Duras. One theory is that he was essentially a circus player, although at a very high level (sort of in the way that Nezhmetdinov was a ‘circus player’). He lived for combinations and was incredibly creative in fabricating them, but at the elite level the best in the world were able to ‘starve out’ the position and deprive Duras of his ingenuity.
The other theory, which I would tend to subscribe to, is that Duras just kind of lost interest in chess or got too cool for it. He had a lot going on. He was from a dazzling cosmopolitan family - his sister was a leading Prague singer, his brother-in-law would become one of Czechoslovakia’s premier sculptors. His family was wealthy enough that, at Hamburg 1910, when Schlechter thought he was going to lose to Duras, Schlechter began complaining to the other tournament participants that Duras was taking prize money from chess masters in need. Somehow or other, he was able to gallivant between New York and St Petersburg in 1913. And then, with the outbreak of war, he entered into military service - serving as a platoon leader - and continued with the Ministry of Defense in the independent Czechoslovak state.
There is far less recorded about Duras’ life available on the internet than I would have hoped for. (Maybe people who read Czech can find more?) The sense is of a meteor - a chess genius, who was also wealthy, witty, urbane, liked by everyone - who then faded out of sight in the confusion of the war and possibly the stresses of his other responsibilities. That’s a big part of why I wanted to do this series - to pay respects to really extraordinary players who have more or less faded out of chess history.

Duras seemed to play without any particular attention to strategy. One way or another, he reached complicated positions and then had an ability to access combinations eight or ten moves deep that worked out in his favor. Ever since Anderssen, the idea had been that this is not the right way to play, that tactics must flow from the position, but the truth is that there are players who are so superlatively talented that they can make it work - Marshall, Spielmann, Duras, Nezhmetdinov, Shirov, etc. I don’t know what there is to learn from it except to marvel at how well pieces can harmonize together. Duras’ other gift, which would seem to be the observe of his gorgeous combinations, was an ability to play the role of spoiler, to fight on in desperate situations. But these are more interconnected than one might think. Most chess players play ‘backwards’ as well as ‘forwards,’ trying to figure out who is ‘better’ based on the progress of the game and what they are therefore entitled to hope for from the position. Duras, like Marshall, seemed not to do that, to look into each position with fresh ideas and to believe that every position offered unique resources to those who were willing to believe in it. Duras often seemed to skip over the opening - reaching some inferior position and then gradually outplaying his opponent in the middle game. But his ingenuity was such that he still managed to contribute greatly to the theory of three major openings. He turned the Duras Variation of the Ruy Lopez into a terrifying offensive weapon. He was the leading classical practitioner of the Caro-Kann. And he introduced the defining strategic idea of the 1910s - a variation of the Queen’s Gambit Declined in which white trades off black’s ‘bad’ light-squared bishop and then invades on the queenside.