Berthold and Emanuel Lasker

A fun rabbit hole!  Berthold was world chess champion Emanuel Lasker’s older brother, and also his first wife was Elsa Lasker-Schüler, the avant-garde German Jewish poet and playwright.

In the 1880s (!) he developed what later was called “Fischer Random” chess, Chess960, or now “freestyle chess,” as Magnus Carlsen has dubbed it.  The opening arrangement of the pieces is randomized on the back rank, to make the game more interesting and also avoid the risks of excessive opening preparation and too many draws.  He was prescient in this regard, though at the time chess was very far from having exhausted the possiblities for interesting openings that were not played out.

For a while he was one of the top ten chess players in the world, and he served as mentor to his brother Emanuel.  Emanuel, in due time, became world chess champion, was an avid and excellent bridge and go player, invented a variant of checkers called “Lasca,” made significant contributions to mathematics, and was known for his work in Kantian philosophy.

Of all world chess champions, he is perhaps the one whose peers failed to give him much of a serious challenge.  Until of course Capablanca beat him in 1921.