A Century of Chess: Bled 1931
What are the most dominating performances in chess history? Bobby Fischer in the 1970-72 Candidates cycle. Caruana at Sinquefield 2014. Some of Kasparov's tournaments towards his 1990s peak and some of Carlsen's towards his in the 2010s. But Alekhine's turn at Bled 1931 ranks high in the conversation. Against international-class competition, he scored 20.5/26, winning 15 games, losing none, finishing a staggering 5.5 points ahead of the next closest competitor, and likely would have done even better if he hadn't cruised to the finish line with a few short draws at the tournament's end. The result seemed even better in the context of the time and contemporaries were left to reach for Lasker's 23.5/28 at London 1899 as the only contender for this sort of dominance.
And it wasn't just that Alekhine won, it was the way he won. He often seemed to be playing a completely different kind of chess, sharper, more muscular, and more versatile, than anything his rivals could put on offer. Aron Nimzowitsch, not a person giving to praising others, was compelled to admit after the tournament, "He is playing with us as though with children." Playing through his games here — and it's not at all easy to choose which ones to select — really is a display of the state of the art of chess at that time, and in all phases of the game.
Against Stoltz, he crashed through with an irresistible attack after a mild miscue. Against Tartakower he played a classical positional game. Against Vidmar (not shown here) it was theory-advancing play in a technical endgame. Against Nimzowitsch — then his leading rival for the world championship — he was particularly sadistic, winning in 19 moves in their first encounter in the tournament and then in 36 moves in the second (and this after a 30-move win at San Remo the year before). With Nimzowitsch, actually, he won through psychological opening preparation — feeling that Nimzowitsch had been insufficiently punished for a pawn-grabbing sortie in a game six years earlier — and then in their next game sprung an opening trap. Against Colle and Flohr, he won with tactical slight-of-hands; against Bogoljubow and Kostić with clean positional play. Against Pirc, he rained down an attack straight out of the opening that tore his opponent's position to shreds. And against Maróczy, he seemed to take a particular delight in beating his opponent in his strengths, defeating him in a complex ending and then in the kind of defensive fortress that Maróczy was so adept at holding. These were the kind of games that, as Fischer would later put it, could "break a man's ego," and the result, together with his 14/15 performance at San Remo the year before, compellingly made the case for Alekhine's being the greatest player of all time.
Nimzowitsch's two losses to Alekhine, and the half-point he finished behind Bogoljubow for third place, were fatal for his career. He had by this stage fully earned the right to challenge for the world title, but, as Rudolf Reinhardt writes in his biography of Nimzowitsch, "three successive catastrophic defeats at the hands of the World Champion impressed the public so much that hardly anyone believed he could wrest the crown from Alekhine. Never mind that the world financial crisis made a world championship match seem hardly financially viable in any case."
At a tournament like Bled, hardly anyone cared about second place, but Efim Bogoljubow put in a credible performance that may have helped him slip ahead of Nimzowitsch in the queue to play Alekhine again. This massacre of Isaac Kashdan — a charter member of the world's elite at the time — helps showcase how lethal the King's Indian Defense was becoming.
The Bled tournament was the brain child of Milan Vidmar, who hoped to put Yugoslav chess on the map internationally — an effort that would pay dividends within the next decades as Yugoslavia emerged as one of the world's powerhouses. It was also the breakout of Gösta Stoltz, a last-minute replacement for Rubinstein, who impressed by finishing in the middle of the pack and would go on to be one of the stars of the 1930s.
Sources: Alekhine annotates several of his games in My Best Games of Chess. Rudolf Reinhardt discusses the tournament from Nimzowitsch's perspective here. Hans Kmoch wrote a book on the tournament that I haven't found online.
