Emanuel Lasker played chess for more than half a century, so his highlight reel spans an astonishing range — from a young man’s tactical fireworks to a champion’s cold-blooded technique. What ties his best games together isn’t a single trick; it’s the will to fight and an uncanny feel for what a real, living opponent would find hardest. Here are the ones that matter most.
A quick note on how we present these: we describe each game in prose from verified sources rather than reprinting a full move list, so you’re never getting a garbled transcript. Where you’d like to play through the moves yourself, the reliable databases and the sources at the foot of this page have them.
The double-bishop sacrifice — Lasker vs. Bauer, Amsterdam 1889
This is the game that made the chess world sit up. Playing Johann Bauer in Amsterdam in 1889, a young Lasker produced one of the most famous attacking ideas ever seen: he sacrificed both of his bishops, one after the other, to rip open the pawns sheltering Bauer’s king.
The pattern — later known as the “Lasker double-bishop sacrifice” — worked like this: Black’s king had castled behind a normal-looking wall of pawns, and Lasker gave up a bishop on one wing and then the other to blast those pawns away. For a moment Black was two pieces up, but his own pieces were stranded far from the action while Lasker’s queen and rook came crashing in down the newly opened files. It’s the kind of combination that looks like magic and turns out to be pure logic.
Why it’s famous: the idea was so clean and so instructive that it became a permanent part of chess education. Later masters echoed the exact same sacrificial pattern in their own games. If you’ve ever been shown the “sac both bishops to open the king” motif, you were being shown Lasker.
The ice-cold endgame — Lasker vs. Capablanca, St. Petersburg 1914
If Bauer showed Lasker’s fireworks, his most famous game shows the opposite side of his genius: patience, psychology, and technique. At the great St. Petersburg 1914 tournament, Lasker needed to beat the young, seemingly invincible José Raúl Capablanca to have a shot at first place. Capablanca was the tougher man to beat precisely because he was so happy to simplify and draw.
So Lasker did something brilliant and counter-intuitive: he chose the Ruy Lopez Exchange Variation and traded queens as early as move six. On the surface, that looks like a peace offer — exactly the dry, simplified game Capablanca wanted. But it was a trap of a very subtle kind. The resulting endgame quietly asked Capablanca to play actively to make his bishop pair count, and when he didn’t, Lasker slowly turned his superior pawn structure into a win. The commentator Luděk Pachman called the opening choice a masterstroke — a psychological read of the opponent dressed up as a boring line.
The win helped Lasker overhaul Capablanca and win the tournament, one of the strongest of the entire pre-war era, ahead of both Capablanca and Alekhine. It’s the perfect Lasker game: he didn’t out-calculate his opponent, he out-thought him.
The championship matches — Steinitz and beyond (1894–1921)
Some of Lasker’s greatest “games” are really whole matches. In 1894 he took on Wilhelm Steinitz, the first World Champion and the man who had defined modern chess strategy, and beat him to claim the crown. When Steinitz demanded a rematch in 1896–97, Lasker won it even more convincingly. Those two matches announced that a new era had arrived.
Over the next two decades Lasker defended the title against the best challengers of the age — among them Frank Marshall, Siegbert Tarrasch, Carl Schlechter, and Dawid Janowski. The Schlechter match of 1910 is a story in itself: Lasker fell behind and had to win the final game just to draw the match and keep his title, which he did under enormous pressure. Match after match, the pattern held — Lasker found a way to fight back.
The grand old man — New York 1924
Even after losing the title to Capablanca in 1921, Lasker wasn’t finished. At New York 1924, one of the strongest tournaments ever held to that point, he finished first — ahead of reigning champion Capablanca and future champion Alekhine. Winning an elite event in your mid-fifties, against the two best players in the world, is a résumé line almost no one else can match. It’s the clearest proof that Lasker’s dominance wasn’t a fluke of an early era: he stayed genuinely world-class for an extraordinarily long time.
Why these games still matter
Lasker’s best games teach something engines can’t: chess is played against a human being. He picked lines that were awkward for this opponent, defended positions others would have resigned, and trusted his endgame technique to convert tiny edges. Studying him is a great cure for the beginner’s habit of playing “the position” in a vacuum instead of playing the person across the board.
FAQ
What is Emanuel Lasker’s most famous game? Two stand out: the double-bishop sacrifice against Bauer (1889) for sheer beauty, and his endgame win over Capablanca at St. Petersburg 1914 for depth and psychology.
What was special about Lasker vs. Capablanca in 1914? Lasker chose the quiet Ruy Lopez Exchange and traded queens early — the opposite of a fighting line on the surface — then out-played Capablanca in the endgame to win a game he badly needed.
What is the Lasker double-bishop sacrifice? An attacking idea, first shown in the 1889 Bauer game, where a player sacrifices both bishops to tear open the pawns around the enemy king, then wins with the queen and rook on the opened files.
Where can I play through Lasker’s games move by move? Reliable, annotated versions live in the major online databases and on the Wikipedia and Chess.com pages cited below.
Keep exploring
Back to Emanuel Lasker’s profile · his playing style · his openings · his rating & career arc · fun facts · or browse all chess players.
Written and fact-checked by the Chess Lab Academy Editorial Team · Facts verified against Wikipedia, the Lasker–Bauer 1889 article, the St. Petersburg 1914 record, and Chess.com, as of July 2026 · Last verified 2026-07-10 · How we verify content.