Emanuel Lasker was born in Prussia in 1868, the son of a Jewish cantor, and was sent to Berlin at 11 to study mathematics. His older brother Berthold taught him chess, and he paid his way by playing chess and cards for small stakes at the Café Kaiserhof. At Breslau in 1889 he won his master title in a playoff after scores were reset for the final group. In New York in 1893 he scored 13 out of 13, and in 1894, after struggling to raise backing and dropping the stakes to $2,000 a side, he beat Wilhelm Steinitz 10 wins to 5 with 4 draws in matches across New York, Philadelphia and Montreal, becoming the second world chess champion.
Critics called it a fluke, so he won top prizes at St. Petersburg, Nuremberg, London and Paris. Opponents thought he played bad moves on purpose, but modern analysis shows he traded structural soundness for dynamic chances ahead of his time. He also earned a PhD under David Hilbert, and his 1905 paper on primary decomposition led to the Lasker-Noether theorem. He held the title 27 years before losing to José Raúl Capablanca in Havana in 1921. His savings vanished in worthless German war bonds, he fled the Nazis with his wife Martha in 1933, and he died in New York in 1941 as a charity patient.
- Siegbert Tarrasch said the only words he would say to Lasker were checkmate, then lost their 1908 match 10.5 to 5.5.
- He beat Dawid Janowski 8 to 2 and 9.5 to 1.5.
- He saved his title in 1910 by winning the final game against Carl Schlechter.
- In Moscow in 1925, news that a Berlin theater had accepted his play distracted him into a loss to Carlos Torre.
- He demanded high appearance fees and copyright over his own game records.
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