A Century of Chess: Capablanca-Kostić 1919
What are the most lopsided matches in chess history? Fischer-Taimanov and Fischer-Larsen in 1971. Lasker-Janowski in 1909 and 1910.
Capablanca-Kostić (1919) is right up there — a classic demonstration of degrees-of-excellence in chess, of what it looks like when a creditable, well-prepared master plays against an absolute genius. And what it looks like is a crush.
It wasn’t completely unreasonable to put up Kostić against Capablanca in 1919. Kostić was in the middle of an impressive tournament run. He finished clear second to Capablanca at New York 1918 and would again at Hastings later in 1919. In both tournaments he had an undefeated score, drew his games with Capablanca, displayed an absolutely sound, classical style. Kostić, who had fought in three wars and been promoted to the rank of captain in the Serbian army, was a chess fanatic. He knew by heart every single master game dating back to 1900 and would go on to be one of the game's greatest-ever popularizers.
Kostić reported a sickening feeling on the way to Havana, a sense of absolute foreboding as he went into the lion’s den — a loss of ambition and an attack of severe headaches. In the first game, he played a sound positional game and then was gradually outplayed, with Capablanca administering what Tartakower called "a zugzwang symphony."
Kostić was so demoralized that, in the second game, he played the wrong opening — a Giuoco Piano rather than a Ruy Lopez — and eventually blundered a pawn.
In the third game, Kostić leapt to the attack. In a highly-theoretical line of the Petroff, Capablanca deliberately chose an inferior line in order to evade Kostić's memory — and what he did worked. Kostić failed to find the sharpest line and the tactical complications turned out in Capablanca's favor.
The best part, really, of playing over the chess of this era is the press coverage — and, here again, the newspapers rose to the occasion. The Cuban newspaper El Mundo lamented that, with this defeat, "the feeling of hopelessness entered into Kostić's manly bosom" and the last two games "broke the backbone of his confidence effectually."
After that loss, the match was finished — and, with it, in a sense, was Kostic’s career. He knew what he was up against and didn’t struggle anymore. He lost two games limply (in the fifth game, resigning a perfectly-playable position on move 15) and then surrendered the match. After 1922, he absented himself from top-flight chess — although he likely would have been one of the top ten in the world for some time — and became a sort of chess showman, traveling all over the world, giving lessons and simultaneous exhibitions. One of the funniest involved a match in Kenya where he sat on the north side of the equator and his opponent on the south side.
As for Capablanca, the match really was just a tune-up for his Lasker match in 1921. Later, he recalled being at the absolute peak of his ability around the time of the Kostić match — and it shows in his play. It was, as Raymond Chandler would write, “beautiful and remorseless, almost creepy in its silent implacability." There was little flash but also no mistakes. It was like he had invented computer chess decades before the invention of the microchip. If you made no mistakes, then chess really was a very simple game. You just made simple logical moves, and virtually no one — not even a viably world-class master like Kostić — could maintain the same level of accuracy.
Sources: Capablanca analyzes Game 3 in My Chess Career and Tartakower Game 1 in 500 Master Games of Chess. Chessgames.com has a lavish write-up on the match, including newspaper clippings from the time. It has the only reference I've seen to Kostić's military career. simaginfan has a nice write-up on Kostić here.
