Hypermodern
An early-20th-century opening school that favors controlling the center with pieces and pawn breaks rather than immediately occupying it with pawns.
Hypermodern openings such as the King's Indian Defense and the Grunfeld Defense allow the opponent to build a broad pawn center, then challenge it later with pieces and flank pawn breaks, in contrast to classical opening principles.
Etymology
The word combines the prefix hyper-, a word-forming element meaning over, above, beyond, and often implying exceedingly or to excess, from Greek hyper meaning over, beyond, overmuch, above measure, with modern. The chess sense was coined by Savielly Tartakower: Wikipedia states that the name hypermodern was originated by Tartakower and that his book Die hypermoderne Schachpartie, in English The Hypermodern Chess Game, was published in 1924. The school emerged after the First World War and was most prominent in the 1920s as a reaction against the orthodoxy of Siegbert Tarrasch, itself derived from Steinitz, which insisted on occupying the centre with pawns. Its leading figures were Aron Nimzowitsch, regarded as its founder and leading practitioner, along with Richard Reti, Tartakower, Gyula Breyer, Efim Bogoljubov and Ernst Grunfeld. Its key texts are Reti's Die neuen Ideen im Schachspiel of 1922 and Nimzowitsch's Mein System, published in five installments between 1925 and 1927.
First documented: 1924 — Savielly Tartakower, Die hypermoderne Schachpartie (1924), the book from which the chess sense of the name derives
Translations
Translations for this term haven't been added yet.