A Century of Chess: Capablanca's Tour 1913-14
In 1913, Capablanca, with his new post in the Cuban Foreign Office, was dispatched to Europe as an emissary-at-large. His titular post was as consul in St Petersburg, but, really, his task was to be a professional chess player, playing as widely as possible in exhibitions and simultaneous matches, in advance of the great St Petersburg tournament of 1914. As a chess tour, it was one of the most successful ever - comparable to Morphy’s European visit of 1858. Capablanca played in London, Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg, Vienna, Kiev, and a dozen smaller cities. He played against Europe’s top players - Nimzowitsch, Alekhine, Bernstein, Tartakower, Teichmann, Mieses, Réti, Bogoljubow - and in master play won nineteen games, lost two, drew five. In simultaneous play, he had the somewhat dizzying score (as best as we can add it up) of +718=91-96.
I have to say that, playing through Capablanca’s games on this tour, I’m a little underwhelmed. He reminds me of a very strong computer program with the occasional glitch. His strength, here as always, was to accurately calculate short variations and to consistently find simple, strong moves that set problems for his opponents. He was hardly a machine, though. In games against Alekhine and Tartakower, he missed simple tricks that would have given his opponents the advantage - and it was luck that his opponents missed their opportunities. (Luck in these cases probably stemmed from the fact that his opponents were overly trusting against Capablanca and didn’t search for cheap shots as they might otherwise have.) He also could become disoriented in complicated positions - and his two losses in this period, against Aurbach and Znoso-Borovsky, were incidences of the same failing, losing the thread on the rare occasions when he deigned to attack.
In the simpler positions where he excelled, his opponents often crumbled as if just through intimidation. In several cases, it turned out that a well-known opponent just didn’t understand endgames nearly as well as he should have - for instance, both Nimzowitsch and Teichmann steered for bishops of opposite color endgames that turned out to be lost.
There is, on the other hand, a great deal that is instructive about his games. As Capablanca wrote of this period, "I played several of my games during these few months." And there is an indelible portrait by A. W. Foster who watched Capablanca play a simultaneous exhibition: "Quietly, without fuss or ostentation, he walked round: smoothly is perhaps the word which fits most closely with his manner of doing it: there was no shower of quips and cranks from Capablanca – 'the play’s the thing.' You could see that he had forgotten all the incidents of physical existence, and, for the time being, was an incarnation of pure intelligence."
A few things to notice:
1) Capablanca’s great indifference to the openings. He played the opening entirely ‘without book’ - just trying to reach a playable middlegame. Incredibly enough, he never seemed to run into prepared lines - or, if he did, he fought his way out of it.
2) The foreshortened middlegame. As with Rubinstein, although to less of an extreme, Capablanca played the middlegame as if trying to reach the ending - fastening on permanent weaknesses and treating strategic exchanges as an attacking weapon.
3) Here is an important point. In the transition from the opening to the middlegame, he very rarely chooses ‘natural moves.’ Instead, he selects moves that have a plan in them. Often, that involves moving a piece twice or deferring castling, but, as soon as possible, he spots a good plan, based around a strategic weakness, and is confident enough in his tactics to play for that plan without taking unnecessary precautions to secure his position. His moves 11...g5 in the Nimzowitsch game and 15...c4 in the Bernstein game are good examples of this approach - generating an effective, concrete plan before an opponent has time to organize himself.
4) The other important principle is that he never backs down. He has a deep faith in the solidity of the position that he has constructed, meaning that when an opponent bids for the initiative or comes up with some trick, he’s confident that the variations will work out in his favor if he calculates only a move or two further ahead - or looks for some resource that his opponents missed. A good example is 29….Qb2!! In the game against Bernstein, where Bernstein’s tactic runs into a devastating counter, or 33….Qc2 against Alekhine, which is a tactic born of confidence - a feeling that the position should be won and the queen can advance, not retreat.
Sources: introuble2 had a wonderful post recently on this tour. I've lifted the photos from there. He did the heavy lifting of trying to find dates and scores for Capablanca's simultaneous exhibitions - and to map out his itinerary. Edward Winter has a post on Capablanca's simultaneous exhibitions. Several of the games on this tour are annotated by Capablanca in My Chess Career. There are several biographies out of Capablanca, including Miguel Sánchez's, but unfortunately most of them are paywalled.
