[2] Mother's name: Esphir Nohumovna Nimzowitsch (born Rabinovich, 1865, Polotsk – 1937), sister – Tsilya-Kreyna Pevzner, brothers Yakov, Osey and Benno.

[5] Nimzowitsch eventually moved to Copenhagen in 1922,[6] where he lived for the rest of his life in one small rented room.

When in form, Nimzowitsch was very dangerous with the black pieces, scoring many fine wins over top players.

Nimzowitsch's chess theories, when first propounded, flew in the face of widely held orthodoxies enunciated by the dominant theorist of the era, Siegbert Tarrasch, and his disciples.

While the greatest players of the time, among them Alekhine, Emanuel Lasker and Capablanca, clearly did not allow their play to be hobbled by blind adherence to general concepts that the center had to be controlled by pawns, that development had to happen in support of this control, that rooks always belong on open files, that wing openings were unsound—core ideas of Tarrasch's chess philosophy as popularly understood—beginners were taught to think of these generalizations as unalterable principles.

Nimzowitsch supplemented many of the earlier simplistic assumptions about chess strategy by enunciating in his turn a further number of general concepts of defensive play aimed at achieving one's own goals by preventing realization of the opponent's plans.

[10] He manoeuvres the black queen from its starting point to h7 to form a part of king-side blockade along with the knight on f6 and h-pawn to stop any attacking threats from White.

"[12] GM Jan Hein Donner called Nimzowitsch "a man who was too much of an artist to be able to prove he was right and who was regarded as something of a madman in his time.

An article by Hans Kmoch and Fred Reinfeld entitled "Unconventional Surrender" on page 55 of the February 1950 Chess Review tells of the "... example of Nimzowitsch, who ... once missed first prize in a tournament in Berlin by losing to Sämisch, and when it became clear he was going to lose the game, Nimzowitsch stood up on the table and shouted, 'Gegen diesen Idioten muss ich verlieren!'

A popular, but probably apocryphal, story is that once when an opponent laid an unlit cigar on the table, he complained to the tournament arbiters, "He is threatening to smoke, and as an old player you must know that the threat is stronger than the execution.

Nimzowitsch's vanity and faith in his ideas of overprotection provoked Hans Kmoch to write a parody about him in February 1928 in the Wiener Schachzeitung.

This consisted of a mock game[17] against the fictional player "Systemsson", supposedly played and annotated by Nimzowitsch himself.

Kmoch also wrote an article about his nine years with Nimzowitsch:[5] Nimzovich suffered from the delusion that he was unappreciated and that the reason was malice.

"[5] Although he had long suffered from heart trouble, his early death was unexpected; taken ill suddenly at the end of 1934, he lay bedridden for three months before dying of pneumonia.