The Capablanca Club

The third World Chess Champion (1921-1927), Josè Raùl Capablanca played a simple and elegant style of chess, based on keen positional intuition and peerless endgame technique. Capablanca played without being defeated for an unprecedented and since unequalled eight-year span at the height of his powers. In his career, he only lost a total of 34 professional games (out of 567 played). In head-to-head match ups, Capablanca had a winning record against all of his contemporaries. In a retrospective analysis of historical chess players, Arpad Elo (inventor of the eponymous Elo rating system) calculated Capablanca to have been the strongest player in history. Indeed, multiple recent analyses have found that Capablanca's moves match modern computer recommendations more often than any other player's. Possibly intuiting this, chess audiences of the early 20th century dubbed Capablanca, "the Human Chess Machine."