A Century of Chess: Alekhine-Capablanca 1927 Part One
Well. This is what we’ve all been waiting for.
Between you and me, chess in the ‘20s can get a bit tedious. There’s no new talent really — only Euwe — and, even though it’s the peak of classical chess, with all the gorgeous backdrop of steamships and resort spas, it’s pretty much just the same dozen top players, all of whom had established themselves before the war, playing endlessly against each other.
But the decade had the single greatest rivalry in chess history — between Capablanca and Alekhine — and having them play against each other is the sort of thing that can only happen in chess. It’s like Mozart and Beethoven fending off against one another, or Hegel and Schopenhauer — two completely different world views and personality structures and with the chance, actually, to settle their differences.
Capablanca was classicism personified, god’s gift to chess — pellucid positional chess approaching a computer-like level of perfection. To his detractors, he was also vain and superficial, but everything about him seemed to fit the mood of the pleasure-loving ‘20s — everything elegant and easy. His play in international tournaments seemed to be squeezed in, always, between tennis and love affairs.
Alekhine, meanwhile, stood for tempestuousness, the Romantic spirit. He certainly was a tremendously gifted player, but it had been clear, since as far back as 1913 or ’14, that in terms of talent alone he wasn’t quite at Capablanca's level. What he represented, then, was the ceaseless effort to improve himself — and to do so through astonishing adversity. He was wounded twice during the war and received three medals for his conscientious service with the Red Cross. He was given up for dead by much of the chess world during the Russian Civil War — a period of time that’s still murky in terms of Alekhine’s biography. He seemed to have abandoned chess for a period in the early 1920s — working as a film actor and police detective. He emigrated from Russia and became a stateless person — his brother was compelled to denounce him in a Soviet newspaper — and had to eke out a living as, essentially, a refugee, while Capablanca at the same time had a sinecure-for-life with the Cuban Foreign Office. Eventually, the psychological pressure would take its toll on Alekhine and he would suffer from alcoholism, but in the ‘20s this relentless drive brought him to his peak.
My favorite story about Alekhine and Capablanca has the two of them attending a music revue during the London 1922 tournament. Capablanca, according to a witness, never took his eyes off the dancing girls. Alekhine, sitting next to him, never took his eyes off a pocket chess set.
For a long time, there seemed to be no real contest between them. Capablanca had finished ahead of Alekhine in all five of the tournaments they had taken part in together. In head-to-head matches, Capablanca had a score of +5=7-0 against him. Alekhine had made a practice of avoiding all possible tournaments that Capablanca played in, and, in the tournaments that he felt obliged to take part in, he often seemed like a shadow of himself — drawing far more games than he normally did, and fading into the background, while Capablanca stole the show.
But Alekhine put those appearances to good use — and treating them more as scouting opportunities than anything. He was subjecting Capablanca’s play to relentless scrutiny, and found Capablanca to be more far more vulnerable than was generally believed. In particular, after New York 1927 — where Capablanca finished 2.5 points ahead of the field and walloped Alekhine in their lone decisive game — Alekhine seemed to come up with the playbook for defeating Capablanca. He would play straight into Capablanca’s perceived strengths — simple positions, the endgame, the transition from the middlegame to the endgame. What he had noticed was that Capablanca could be sloppy in his technique but his opponents were so demoralized playing against him that they often didn’t look for the very best moves.
It’s a bit mysterious how the match ended up in, of all places, Buenos Aires. Argentina would later become a chess powerhouse, but the match was the first significant chess event ever held there — a stroke of luck for the Argentine Chess Club since it was also, probably, the single greatest chess match ever played.
Alekhine shocked the chess world by winning the first game with ease. Capablanca seemed not to be paying very close attention in a placid-looking French Defense and Alekhine won a clear pawn straight out of the opening.
After a throat-clearing draw, Capablanca equalized the match in Game 3 by winning material straight out of the opening.
After this, the players seemed to put one set of sabres away — there would be no more king’s pawn openings and no more Indian defenses — and to begin the match in earnest. They parried with each other for three dull draws, but this phase may have had a psychological impact on the outcome of the match — Capablanca implicitly agreed to play the entirety of the match within dense theoretical lines of the Queen’s Gambit Declined. For Robert Huebner, this was a real blunder — with Capablanca depriving himself of his leading trump card, his ability to devise a clear strategic plan in the early part of the middlegame, and instead giving Alekhine the opportunity to outwork him over midnight oil. This decision also led to the match losing a significant amount of its interest for the general public — the rest of the games would be played in dry, theoretical positions, prompting Harry Golembek to declare that after playing through the games of the match one would wish that the Orthodox Defense to the Queen's Gambit Declined "had never been invented."
In Game 7, Capablanca won with the kind of clear-cut positional victory that the chess world had seen so many times before from him. After the initial confusion, this seemed to be the match developing as expected — with Capablanca setting the tone and taking a lead.
The players continued to jab at each other with three quiet draws in games eight to ten — with Alekhine likely cognizant that a two-point lead for Capablanca would be close to putting to putting the match away. Probably Game 11 was the most significant of the match. Alekhine would call it “a comedy of errors” — and both players had chances to win at different points in the game. The game established probably the overriding theme of the match — Alekhine’s skill in playing from cramped, defensive positions — which is exactly the sort of play that one least associates with him. Capablanca seemed to be on his way to a positional crush but overextended. In the endgame, Capablanca had several opportunities to draw but missed them and allowed Alekhine to equalize the match.
More marvels were to come. Out of a blocked, inoffensive position in Game 12, Capablanca let his rook get offsides and had it promptly trapped. He commented, "That was shocking. I cannot recognize myself as the player who lost the game."
Now started a streak of eight consecutive draws, with both players probably needing something of a psychological buffer after the shocks of the early part of the match. Games 13 and 14 had no drama to them. Capablanca won a pawn in Game 15, but it resulted in a drawn bishops-of-opposite-colors endgame. Game 16 was a non-event in one of the match’s tabiya lines.
In Game 17, Capablanca served for win. He had a significant advantage when Alekhine prematurely exchanged queens but missed the moment to exploit it. After the game, he was heard to mutter, "If I couldn't win this game, I can't win the match."
We'll continue next week with the second half of the match.
