A Century of Chess: Hastings 1934/5

The peak of British gentlemanly chess. Sir George Thomas was a real throwback player. He may well have been Britain's greatest-ever badminton player, as well as being strong enough at tennis to reach the final rounds at Wimbledon. In 1918 he inherited a baronet, which made him the last true aristocrat to be closely linked to "the royal game." What he wasn’t was an international-elite player. He stayed true to an amateur vision of chess that valorized Romantic attacks and had by this time been thoroughly replaced by the ‘scientific school.’ But at Hastings — one of the strongest Hastings iterations ever, featuring three world champions — Thomas had the tournament of his career, defeating Botvinnik and Capablanca.

He entered into the last round with a half point lead over Euwe and playing against his compatriot Michell. As @phonybenoni wrote on chessgames.com, "In almost any other country, at any other time, the result would have been foreordained: a friendly draw." But that wasn’t the spirit of the British sporting tradition. They played a fighting game, which Michell won. It wasn’t completely a disaster for Thomas — Euwe was so impressed by Thomas' spirit that he offered a draw from a better position, leading to a a three-way tie for first with Flohr — but the result spoke eloquently to the virtues as well as the drawbacks of the British sporting tradition. 

Thomas’ career-defining event somewhat obscured a more important development from the perspective of chess history, which was the continued rise of Euwe with Euwe showing himself to be in good form prior to the planned Alekhine match. 

And Euwe’s performance in turn obscured that of Salo Flohr, who seemed to be playing with his own laws of gravity where any positional miscue by an opponent quickly proved fatal. 

The most famous game of the tournament wasn't played by any of the winners. It was the fifth-place finisher Andre Lilienthal playing the game of his career against Capablanca. The game left such an impression that Bobby Fischer, meeting Lilienthal at his 1992 Spassky return match, greeted him by saying "Pawn e5 takes f6." 

For Capablanca, even though he lost two famous games and finished out of the money, the result wasn’t so mortifying — he had been absent from chess since 1931 and would go on to have a strong year in 1936. Botvinnik, however, called the tournament “my fiasco.” This was the first chance to show Soviet chess to the outside world; for any other Soviet player, the result here might have been a career-ender. Botvinnik was fortunate to have the political connections he did; he would soon have other chances.

Sources: chessgames.com has a very good write-up on this tournament. Soltis gives Botvinnik's perspective on the tournaments in Soviet Chess and his Botvinnik biography. Edward Winter has an extensive piece on Thomas. Chess Marginalia has a piece on the tournament from Lilienthal's perspective.