Rubinstein's Immortal

Georg Rotlewi vs Akiba Rubinstein, Łódź 1907 · Queen's Gambit, Symmetrical Tarrasch · 0-1

Akiba Rubinstein

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Georg Rotlewi

Step through the game; it stops where a move is worth finding.

Before move one

Coach

For fifteen moves this is a mirror. Both sides play the same pawns to the same squares, both bishops end up aimed at the same diagonals, and the only thing either player can own is time. Rubinstein finishes the opening two moves to the good, which sounds like nothing, and then converts it into a finish where his queen and both rooks hang at once. The annotators are unusually united on where it went wrong: Marco in 1908, Edward Lasker soon after, and John Bartholomew a century later all put White's mistake on the same quiet queen move, and all three name the same alternative.

Engine plan

Count the moves rather than the pawns. The whole game is two tempi, and Marco says exactly when White loses each of them.
Watch the two bishops. Rubinstein puts them on b7 and b6 while nothing is happening, and both are load-bearing in the mate twenty moves later.
When White pushes the centre pawns, ask what the advance opens rather than what it attacks. Marco calls one of those pushes the losing move.
In the combination, stop looking at material. Three of Black's last four moves leave something hanging, and every one of them is forced.

Scoresheet

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