Coffeehouses were hotbeds of chess in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The following well-known miniature between Richard Reti and Savielly Tartakower was likely played in Vienna's Café Central, with a ten-crown bet on the outcome. This game is not how to play the Caro-Kann Defense.
Richard Reti, a childhood chess prodigy, abandoned a mathematics career for chess after he lost his doctoral thesis; though he is best known for his advocacy of hypermodernism, he was also one of the best players in the world in the 1910s and 1920s. The cosmopolitan Savielly Tartakower abandoned a law career for chess; his clever chess aphorisms are still quoted today, and he obtained excellent results at the chess Olympiads as both a player and a coach.
