Torre's Windmill

Carlos Torre was twenty years old when he produced the combination that made his name against the far more experienced Emanuel Lasker at Moscow 1925, the first international tournament staged by the Soviet state. Capablanca won the event outright, with Lasker, then fifty-six, taking second and Torre a very respectable sixth.

The famous sequence is the windmill: a repeating pattern of discovered checks beginning 26.Rxg7+, in which White's rook and bishop take turns giving check while scooping up Black's queenside pawns and eventually the queen itself. By the time the pattern ends, White has won a full queen for a bishop, and Lasker, facing hopeless material odds, stopped rather than play the loss out to the end. The motif is still taught today as the standard example of the windmill idea.

Torre's career was cut tragically short: within a year of this result he suffered a severe breakdown and effectively retired from top level competition while still in his early twenties. The precise cause is disputed in different retellings, with romantic disappointment and professional setbacks both featuring, so it is offered here as background colour rather than settled biography. The exact date of this specific game within the six week tournament is likewise not confirmed against a primary source.