A Century of Chess: Havana 1913
The second of a two-part series - a joint venture by the Manhattan and Havana Chess Clubs that served as an unofficial Pan-American championship. Capablanca won New York, winning his first ten straight games, and, after a loss to Jaffe, just holding on to beat Marshall by a half-point. Havana was again a race between those two, although this time with the result reversed and Marshall staggering to the finish line a half-point ahead of Capablanca.
It was a wildly popular event, maybe the high point of chess in the Americas, at least until the advent of Fischer. 600 Cubans turned out to cheer on Capablanca, who had become an international star and was maybe the most famous Cuban in the world.
Capablanca played his usual classy chess but he lost one of his games to Janowski and, most pivotally, lost to Marshall. “Capablanca staked all to win and lost,” wrote Marshall of their game. “The game is far from perfect but it reflects the tense excitement of the situation.” Capablanca reached exactly the sort of simple endgame where he was infallible and then somehow lost the thread. Marshall, hearing the tremendous roar of the crowd when the result was posted, thought the crowd was out for his blood and asked for security escort to his hotel - and then discovered that the crowd, sportingly, was cheering for him, impressed that he had overcome the great Capablanca.
The race was tight all the way to the last round. Marshall was in fantastic form in 1913. He was undefeated at the New York tournament and went through 13 rounds in Cuba undefeated, but, before his last round game with Janowski, Janowski promised to defeat him - and carried through on the promise. That gave Capablanca his chance, but, from a favorable position, he only managed to draw Kupchik - he blamed his momentary lapse on “the heat and noise in the playing hall and the intemperance of the spectators.”
The tournament was marred by a thrown-game controversy, which centered, not-at-all-surprisingly on the ever-problematic Charles Jaffe (and which has several parallels to Carlsen/Niemann). Jaffe lost a late-round game to Marshall with an elementary blunder. Capablanca accused Jaffe not only of throwing that game in an effort to help Marshall win but also of passing up easy opportunities in his first, drawn game with Marshall - an accusation that essentially ruined Jaffe’s career. From that point forward, organizers tended to disinvite Jaffe to any event that Capablanca was likely to attend, and Jaffe, in addition to his difficult personality, had a reputation as a cheat. It seems somehow unlikely that Jaffe, who was deeply self-centered, would be so patriotic as to throw his games just to help a fellow American. The proof turns on the games and the question of how likely it is that a strong player could miss an easy move. I kind of suspect, looking at the games, that Jaffe was innocent. In the first round draw, Jaffe did miss an easy win but it was a case of double blindness - Marshall’s previous move was a blunder that opened up an unlikely avenue of attack. In the eighth round loss Jaffe made a really horrible move that cost him his queen, but it’s a particular type of deflection that's notoriously hard to spot. I admit that, in playing over the game, it took me about five or ten seconds to find the move - even though I knew there was a blunder at that moment. Capablanca, though, was completely convinced of it. Here is what Capablanca wrote in the tournament book: “As with the first game between these two masters, no annotations are required because it is obvious that Jaffe did not make any attempt at winning, and his blunder on the twentieth move is best concealed and the game passed over."
David Janowski was rapidly fading out of the world’s elite, but he was in form at Havana and the key variable in the final placement. He won against both Capablanca and Marshall and was in the hunt to win the tournament until a pair of late-tournament losses against Chajes and Capablanca dropped him to third place.
Sources: Capablanca briefly discusses the tournament in My Chess Career, Marshall in My Fifty Years of Chess. Edward Winter discusses the thrown game controversy in his article on Jaffe. Miquel Sanchez's José Raul Capablanca (paywalled) has more on the tournament.
