Steinitz, the Father of Modern Chess Strategy
Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official World Champion (see our piece on that 1886 match), is remembered less for any single brilliancy than for a genuinely new idea: that attacks require positional justification, better development, more space, a weakness to target, rather than talent or courage alone. His 1892 title defence against Mikhail Chigorin, the era's leading combinative attacker, is the clearest demonstration of that idea in practice.
The idea itself
Steinitz argued that a sound attack must be earned through concrete factors, a lead in development, a spatial advantage, control of a key file or diagonal, a genuine weakness in the opponent's position, rather than launched simply because attacking felt more natural. Just as radically, he argued that defence was not a passive last resort but an active strategic resource: a well-defended position could absorb an unjustified attack and then punish the attacker for overreaching.
Chigorin: the perfect contrast
Mikhail Chigorin represented almost the exact opposite chess philosophy, instinctive, combinative, willing to sacrifice on the strength of intuition rather than concrete calculation of who actually stood better. Their 1892 World Championship match in Havana, Steinitz's fourth consecutive title defence and his second specifically against Chigorin, was as close to a controlled experiment in contrasting styles as chess history offers.
How it actually finished
Steinitz won the match 10-8, but the ending was almost unbearably dramatic on its own terms: with the score at 9-8 in Steinitz's favour, Chigorin blundered a mate in two in a level final game, handing Steinitz the match outright. Even the manner of the finish fit the broader story, calm accumulation eventually outlasting brilliance, sometimes by the smallest possible margin.
Why this outlook still runs the sport
Every modern player who evaluates "do I actually have enough for this attack" before committing to a sacrifice is working inside a framework Steinitz built. His insight was not that attacking chess is wrong, his own students and successors, Chigorin included, kept attacking constantly, it was that an attack needs to be earned first, an idea so completely absorbed into how chess is taught today that it barely reads as an idea at all anymore.
Try it yourself
Before your next sacrifice, ask Steinitz's question directly: what specific, concrete advantage do I already have that justifies giving up material now? If the honest answer is "it just feels right," that is precisely the instinct Steinitz spent his career teaching players to interrogate rather than trust blindly.