Nottingham 1936

The Nottingham Chess Tournament was held on August 10-28, 1936 at the University of Nottingham, England. It featured 15 players, five past, present, or future world champions: Emanuel Lasker, José Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Max Euwe, and Mikhail Botvinnik. Other prominent players were Reuben Fine, Samuel Reschevsky, and Salo Flohr.

The tournament fascinates for a number of reasons. A splendid 21st Century Edition of the tournament book, Nottingham 1936, originally annotated by Alekhine, was published with a Foreword by Andy Soltis in 2009 (Russell Enterprises). This edition features Alekhine’s text plus figurine algebraic notation and many more diagrams. It also preserves the classic photo of all the players, found in the Dover edition (1962, ed. W.H. Watts; corrected republication of the 1937 volume). This is sometimes said to be “one of the most frequently reproduced illustrations in chess history” (Edward Winter):

An excellent discussion of this book and the tournament is “Tim's Tournament Book Blog XVI: Nottingham 1936” at https://www.chess.com/blog/SLBM1959/tims-tournament-book-blog-xvi-nottingham-1936.

The flavor of the tournament is also captured by a series of photos of participants and the tournament found in Edward Winter’s https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/nottingham.html as “Photographs of Nottingham 1936.”

                       
The significance of Nottingham 1936 is captured by Andy Soltis’ comments in The Great Chess Tournaments and Their Stories:

Nottingham 1936 was a landmark. It was Lasker’s last tournament, the last good showing for Capablanca, the last accomplishment by the generation that emerged before the first World War. Even at 44 Alekhine was in decline, and by the time he faced a field of such grandmasters again—at AVRO 1948—he could only manage an even score. The ebullient Bogolyubov never played in a major event after this, and Vidmar turned to tournament direction.

On the other hand, there was a new generation, born in this century, composed of people no one had ever heard of until a few years before—Botvinnik, Flohr, the young Americans Fine and Reshevsky. When another war interrupted tournament chess—midway through the international team event at Buenos Aires in 1939—the players went into hibernation for six years. When it was over, Capablanca and Lasker were dead and Alekhine was on the verge. Thus, Nottingham was one of those rare face-to-face meetings of chess generations [Andy Soltis, The Great Chess Tournaments and Their Stories (Radnor, Pennsylvania: Chilton Book Company, 1975), 161.

 This Crossword focuses primarily on the tournament players. I hope you find some bits of interest!

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