A Century of Chess: Capablanca-Euwe 1931

Max Euwe continued his social promotion-y path to the world championship by being paired in a match with Capablanca. Euwe had never won a major international tournament and probably wasn’t in the top five in the world, but he just finished ahead of Capablanca at Hastings and had over the last three years played two matches with Bogoljubow and now one with Capablanca and was very much in the conversation for a world championship match with Alekhine. All this was the dividend for coming from a small, chess-positive country with a strong capacity for organization and no other obvious champions.

But if it’s hard to argue that Euwe deserved the match, it was closer than might have been expected — Capablanca had lost a step and Euwe really was improving — and was a portent of what was to come against Alekhine. 

Game 1 was a grandmaster draw. Game 2 was a short, lively draw. Euwe outfoxed Capablanca in the theoretical stage of the game, let his advantage slip, but found a clever way to force the draw. Game 3 was a vintage Capablanca win in which he found the right tactics on defense and converted to an advantageous ending. 

Game 4 produced a strange pawn structure and a kind of a swampy position in which neither side obtained an advantage. Game 5 could easily have been Euwe’s game. He beat Capablanca in the opening, had a protected pawn on the 7th for much of the middle game, and eventually swapped it for a pawn plus, but Capablanca defended coolly and never seemed to be in particular danger in the resulting queen ending. Both game six and game seven were quiet grandmaster draws. Game 8 was Euwe’s big chance. He caught Capablanca in an opening trap and won a clear exchange, but he couldn’t convert in the endgame against Capablanca’s plucky defense. 

Euwe may well have been demoralized after the near-miss in Game 8 and Capablanca took advantage in Game 9 with his sharpest, and best, game of the match, winning with a pawn sacrifice and old school attack. 

In Game 10, with the match result already determined, the players repeated the theoretical duel from Game 8 with Capablanca wandering again into the Monticelli Trap and showing that he could draw without particular difficulty.

It’s possible to see the match as a John Henry-ish tale of the new ways against the old, with Capablanca standing for natural play and Euwe for a new approach that emphasized theoretical preparation at the expense of talent. Many of the games in the match fell into a particular pattern, with Euwe winning a theoretical duel in the opening or at least obtaining an initiative and Capablanca holding the line through delicate defensive play in the middlegame. Capablanca was tactically sharp enough to stay in the drawing window in games 2, 5, and 8, but in many ways he was lucky — his approach to the game didn’t have the sophistication or deep preparation of the new way. 

Sources: The match is discussed in Munninghoff's biography of Euwe and the analysis of Game 9 in an Edward Winter post here.