Richard Teichmann (24 December 1868 – 15 June 1925) was a German chess master and a chess composer. He was known as "Richard the Fifth" because he often finished in fifth place in tournaments. But in 1911 he scored a convincing win in Karlsbad, crushing Akiba Rubinstein and Carl Schlechter with the same line of the Ruy Lopez. José Raúl Capablanca called him "one of the finest players in the world". Edward Lasker recounted the witty way in which Teichmann demonstrated the Schlechter win in his book Chess Secrets I learned from the Masters, and generally admired Teichmann's mastery. Throughout his chess career Teichmann was handicapped by chronic eye trouble. He had only one eye, and eye trouble caused him to withdraw from the 1899 London Tournament after only four rounds.

Game record

Teichmann had an almost even score against Alexander Alekhine overall (+3–4=4), drawing a match in 1921 (+2–2=2) when Alekhine was regarded as a world title challenger to José Raúl Capablanca. He even won as Black against Alekhine in this match at Berlin 1921: They played a seventh tiebreaker game to determine the match winner, a French Defense Alekhine won with the black pieces. Teichmann's records against Emanuel Lasker and Capablanca were poor (+0−4=0 and +0−2=1); however, he scored wins against all the other leading players of his day, e.g. Carl Schlechter (+4−2=21), Frank Marshall (+7−7=17), Aron Nimzowitsch (+1−1=5), Siegbert Tarrasch (+5−7=2), Akiba Rubinstein (+5−6=11), Géza Maróczy (+1−2=12) and David Janowski (+4−5=4).

Chess is 99% Tactics

Today Richard Teichmann is most commonly attributed as the author of the quotation "Chess is 99% tactics," which does not appear in any of his publications. It appears that it was said by him in a private conversation with the Swiss chess master Erwin Voellmy, who later published a series of books on tactics and wrote in one of the volumes: ‘...the great master and teacher Teichmann explained to me years ago in Zürich (although he slightly exaggerated): “To 99% chess consists of tactics”.’