A Century of Chess: Capablanca-Marshall 1909

What is the greatest début in chess history? Easy. Capablanca’s thrashing of Frank Marshall in their 1909 match (+8-1=14). The others that come to mind are Morphy in 1857, Spassky in 1955, Fischer in 1958, but they had all had some seasoning before, whereas Capablanca’s début was the closest to the fantasy that every beginning chess player has and that never actually occurs: enter into serious competition and on the very first try watch how a grandmaster’s face changes when staggered by your play.

 That was also Capablanca’s verdict on the match. “I can safely say that no player ever performed such a feat, as it was my first encounter against a master, and such a master, one of the first ten in the whole world,” he wrote. “My victory put me at once in the foremost rank among the great masters of the game.”

Later on, Capablanca could be a bit arrogant in his statements about his play, but there’s something very winning in the way he writes about this match – a young man genuinely stunned by his own talent.

And, in defeat, Marshall was graciousness itself – he seemed to realize that he hadn’t played particularly badly, that he simply was facing a superior chess intelligence – and he went on to vouch for Capablanca in his invitation to the San Sebastian tournament in 1911 (which, probably, could qualify as the second greatest début in chess history, Capablanca’s clear first place win over the crème de la crème of the chess world).

Marshall and Capablanca would go on to have their differences, but there’s a feeling of halcyon days and enchantment about this match, two great sportsmen participating together in a maybe-never-to-be-repeated event.

To be fair, though, Capablanca wasn’t a completely unknown quantity in 1909. in 1902, at 13 years old, he won a match against the Cuban champion Corzo, and in the 1900s was known both in Havana and New York as a prodigy. As early as 1905, Lasker – who really was a phenomenal talent scout – wrote: “Youthful precocity is ascribed to the young player which antedates that of any other chess exponent known to history” before noting that Capablanca was currently a high school student in South Orange, New Jersey, and that, unfortunately, the principal had recently advised him to “forego chess until his studies were concluded.”

 But, by 1909, Capablanca had dropped out of school to concentrate on chess. He took an exhibition tour of the United States and, he wrote, “broke all the records for simultaneous chess.” That made his reputation and, as he wrote, “my great strength being evident no difficulty was experienced in arranging the match against Marshall.” Marshall had a different perspective on it – “taking the whole thing very lightly” as he expected Capablanca to be a “pushover.”

And then the match itself, conducted mostly in New York City with pit stops in Morristown, Scranton, and Wilkes-Barre, quickly proved to be a rout. Spectators were struck by Capablanca’s nonchalant approach – taking “brisk strides in a separate room while Marshall was buried in thought at the board trying to save another lost position.”

Capablanca made a great deal of the inferiority of his opening knowledge, but, really, his openings looked perfectly fine – cribbed from Lasker’s play in his matches against Tarrasch and Marshall. Capablanca wrote of the match: “The play showed that I was weak in the openings and just about strong enough in the simple play for position. My great strength lay in the endgame, and I also excelled in combinations of the middle game. I had a fine judgment as to whether a given position was won or lost and was able to defend a difficult position as few players could, as I repeatedly demonstrated during the course of the match, in repulsing Marshall’s onslaughts.”

Capablanca’s greatest wins were early in the match and proved that he could more than hold his own in the complex combinative positions that Marshall was clearly aiming for. Shrewdly, Marshall attempted to reboot the match, staving off defeat with a Kasparovian streak of nine consecutive draws during which he endeavored to find weak points in Capablanca’s play, but by that stage it was already too late.

Capablanca scored an eighth win to finish the match – starting the vertical ascent of his chess career which would be a string of uninterrupted successes, really, until the 1927 match against Alekhine. For Marshall, the Capablanca defeat was his fifth match loss, and probably the moment, sad to say, when he was no longer a truly first-rank player.