Baden-Baden 1925: The Stage
The Baden-Baden tournament of 1925 was the strongest event held in Germany since the war. Rubinstein, Bogoljubov, Tartakower, Marshall, Nimzowitsch and Sämisch all took their places, and so did Richard Réti, the Czechoslovak grandmaster who had become the public face of the hypermodern school. Réti arrived with a fearsome reputation: at New York 1924 he had inflicted on José Raúl Capablanca his first tournament defeat in eight years.
Alexander Alekhine arrived with something to prove. He was the obvious challenger for Capablanca's crown, but the match would not happen until 1927, and in the meantime every tournament was an audition. He treated Baden-Baden as exactly that, scoring 16 points from 20 games without a single loss to take first place ahead of Rubinstein. The result belongs in any account of the road to the World Chess Championships, but one game from the event has outlived even the tournament table. It came in round eight, when Alekhine sat down with the black pieces opposite Réti.
A Hypermodern Opening, Reversed
Réti opened with 1.g3, the kind of flank development he had made famous, and Alekhine answered with a small joke of his own: 1...e5, followed after 2.Nf3 by 2...e4, pushing the knight around as if he were playing Alekhine's Defence with colours reversed. The game continued 3.Nd4 d5 4.d3 exd3 5.Qxd3 Nf6 6.Bg2 Bb4+ 7.Bd2 Bxd2+ 8.Nxd2 0-0 9.c4 Na6, and a long positional struggle began in which Réti's fianchettoed bishop stared down the long diagonal while Alekhine probed for activity.
The middlegame contained a curiosity that annotators still discuss. Between moves 17 and 19 Alekhine shuffled his bishop between g4 and h3, repeating the position twice. Some saw it as a draw offer; Alekhine later explained it as a practical device, gaining time on the clock and inviting Réti to vary. Réti did vary, retreating his bishop to h1, and the game went on. By move 25 White had advanced on the queenside with b4, a4 and b5, while Alekhine had quietly opened the h-file with 22...h4 and 23...hxg3. The board looked balanced. It was not.
26...Re3: The Rook That Could Not Be Taken
After 25.b5 axb5 26.axb5, Alekhine played the move that gives this page its name: 26...Re3. The rook plants itself on a square attacked by the pawn on f2, in the heart of White's position, with no immediate threat visible to the naked eye. It looks like a misclick from a future century. It is in fact the start of one of the deepest forced sequences in chess history.
The rook is immune. After 27.fxe3 Qxg3+ 28.Bg2 Nxe3, the black knight attacks the white queen on c4 and simultaneously threatens mate on g2, and White cannot parry both. Declining with 27.Kh2 walks into the same storm on the exposed king. Réti found the best defence, 27.Nf3, and the rook simply stayed on e3, untouchable, cutting White's third rank in two. Among the great paradoxical rook moves in the canon of chess tactics, only a handful sit on a square twice attacked by pawns and survive. This one survived for ten more moves.
The Combination: Fourteen Moves to a Fork
What followed was not a single blow but a cascade. Play continued 27...cxb5 28.Qxb5 Nc3 29.Qxb7 Qxb7 30.Nxb7 Nxe2+ 31.Kh2, and now came 31...Ne4, a second knight joining the assault. After 32.Rc4 Nxf2 33.Bg2 Be6 34.Rcc2 Ng4+ 35.Kh3 Ne5+ 36.Kh2 Alekhine uncorked 36...Rxf3, finally giving up the famous rook at full price, since 37.Bxf3 loses to a knight discovery. Réti tried 37.Rxe2 instead, and the knights danced on: 37...Ng4+ 38.Kh3 Ne3+ 39.Kh2 Nxc2 40.Bxf3 Nd4.
That last quiet move is the point of everything. The knight on d4 forks the rook on e2 and the bishop on f3. A combination that began with a rook on e3 on the kingside ends, fourteen moves later, with a knight fork winning material on the other wing. Réti resigned on the spot. Annotators checked the sequence for decades, and modern engines have confirmed it: there was no escape after move 26. Every check, every zwischenzug, every retreat had been foreseen at the board.
Aftermath and Legacy
Alekhine called this one of the finest games of his career, and posterity has gone further, generally naming it his masterpiece outright. It appears in virtually every anthology of famous chess games, and Tartakower, Kmoch and Réti's own contemporaries praised it without reservation. For Réti there was no shame in it. He had played a principled hypermodern game and lost to calculation that no other player alive could have produced. He died young, in 1929, remembered as one of the great innovators among famous chess players.
The game's deeper legacy is conceptual. It demonstrated that the hypermodern revolution and the classical attacking tradition were not enemies: Alekhine absorbed Réti's positional ideas and welded them to combinative power, a synthesis that shaped chess strategy for the rest of the century. Garry Kasparov, analysing it in his Great Predecessors series, treated 26...Re3 as a defining example of dynamic chess. Students still study the finish as a lesson in how middlegame combinations resolve into won chess endgames, and the rook on e3 remains shorthand, a hundred years on, for the move that looks impossible and is merely correct.
Jaques of London — Making Chess Sets Since 1849
By 1925, FIDE regulations mandated the Staunton pattern for serious competition, the design originally created by Jaques of London in 1849 and named for Howard Staunton. The pieces Réti and Alekhine handled at Baden-Baden were direct descendants of that first Staunton chess set, a design that traces straight back to the Jaques of London workshop. The same pattern is still made today.
Shop Staunton Chess Sets →Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why could Réti not simply capture the rook on e3?
Both captures lose by force. After 27.fxe3, Black plays 27...Qxg3+ and the attack crashes through: 28.Bg2 allows 28...Nxe3, when the knight attacks the white queen on c4 and at the same time threatens mate on g2. White cannot deal with both threats, so the f-pawn capture is impossible. The alternative 27.Kh2 fails to a similar assault on the exposed king, since the rook on e3 cuts the third rank and ties White to the defence of g3. Réti therefore had to leave the rook standing on e3 and played 27.Nf3, after which the rook remained on its outrageous square for ten more moves while Alekhine built the winning combination around it.
Q: How deep was Alekhine's combination after 26...Re3?
The combination runs from move 26 to move 40, roughly fourteen moves, and analysts have never found a forced refutation. After 26...Re3 27.Nf3 cxb5 28.Qxb5 Nc3 29.Qxb7 Qxb7 30.Nxb7 Nxe2+ 31.Kh2 Ne4, Alekhine kept finding the only moves that sustained the initiative: 32.Rc4 Nxf2 33.Bg2 Be6 34.Rcc2 Ng4+ 35.Kh3 Ne5+ 36.Kh2 Rxf3 37.Rxe2 Ng4+ 38.Kh3 Ne3+ 39.Kh2 Nxc2 40.Bxf3 Nd4. The final position is the point of everything: the knight on d4 forks the rook on e2 and the bishop on f3, so White loses a piece by force. Réti resigned at once.
Q: Why is Réti versus Alekhine at Baden-Baden 1925 called Alekhine's finest game?
Because it shows every element of Alekhine's genius in a single game: a provocative opening, patient manoeuvring, a stunning tactical eruption, and a combination calculated further than any contemporary could follow. Alekhine himself ranked it among the very best games he ever played, and annotators from Tartakower onward treated it as the model attacking game of the interwar era. What sets it apart from other brilliancies is that it was played against a world-class opponent in peak form. Réti had defeated Capablanca only a year earlier at New York 1924, made no obvious blunder, and was still beaten by force. The finish, a quiet knight fork on d4 fourteen moves after the rook landed on e3, gives the game a sense of inevitability that no other Alekhine combination quite matches.
Q: Who won the Baden-Baden 1925 tournament?
Alexander Alekhine won it, and in commanding style. Baden-Baden 1925 was one of the strongest tournaments of the decade, gathering Rubinstein, Sämisch, Bogoljubov, Tartakower, Marshall, Nimzowitsch, Réti and others. Alekhine finished first with 16 points from 20 games without losing a single game, ahead of Rubinstein in second place. The result confirmed him as the leading challenger of his generation, and two years later he defeated Capablanca at Buenos Aires 1927 to become the fourth world champion. The Réti game from this event is the one history remembers most, but the tournament as a whole marked the moment Alekhine moved from brilliant contender to champion in waiting.