Alekhine's Baden-Baden Brilliancy

Alexander Alekhine himself rated this win over Richard Reti at Baden-Baden 1925 among the best games of his career, putting it alongside his queen sacrifice against Bogoljubov at Hastings three years earlier. Max Euwe went further, calling it the deepest strategic combination involving rooks and minor pieces ever played. Reti had White and, in a nice irony, was one of the leading theorists of the hypermodern opening ideas that Alekhine then used to dismantle him over a long and complicated middlegame.

A repeating bishop manoeuvre on the kingside (the bishop shuttling between g4 and h3) meant the position was arguably repeated during the game, and Alekhine could plausibly have claimed a draw rather than press on; he chose to fight for the win instead. Historians, led by Edward Winter's research on chesshistory.com, have found at least three different published versions of exactly how many times the manoeuvre repeated and therefore at what move number the game actually finished with the winning ...Nd4. The movetext given here follows the version most widely reproduced in modern databases; readers should treat the precise move numbers in the closing stretch as the subject of genuine historical disagreement rather than settled fact.

Whichever count is correct, the outcome is not in doubt: White resigned after Black's knight arrived on d4, unable to prevent the loss of further material.