A Century of Chess: José Raúl Capablanca (1920-29)
If there is a chess heaven, it may well look like chess in the early 1920s. The players will wear tuxedos. The photos will all be in black-and-white. Opening innovations will be discovered while on ocean liners. And what is not at all in dispute is that, in chess heaven, José Raul Capablanca will be the world champion — and, really, on kind of a permanent basis.
From the moment Capablanca emerged, with his match victory over Marshall in 1909 and triumph at San Sebastián in 1911, if not in the rumors of him as an almost-legendary prodigy before then, it was completely clear what Capablanca’s fate would be — that he would be the world champion, and that he would be completely to the manner born, stylish, elegant, the perfect ambassador of chess, and winning with ridiculous ease. As soon as he defeated an elite field in his San Sebastián debut, there were efforts to arrange a world championship match. The inevitable was delayed by the war, but with the 1920s Capablanca finally got the match and it was just as much a coronation as expected. Lasker actually wanted to hand off the title without fighting for it, but that was pushing things and a match was arranged in Havana where Capablanca won smoothly, by four games, and was never in danger.
At that point Capablanca was as close as any chess player has gotten to invincibility. He was in the midst of a six-year streak without losing any serious games. At a strong tournament in London, he won by a point-and-a-half. And the theme of his play at this time was just how easy he could make it. He might spend a game sitting at the bar talking to a woman and only ever so often stroll over to the board to make a move — and still win with ease. He might spend a tournament dedicating himself entirely to tennis — appearing for games in tennis whites, expecting to make quick work of it. In one famous incident Milan Vidmar dove across a playing hall to resign a game against Capablanca lest he unfairly take a game from Capablanca, who had forgotten about the resumption.
But Capablanca hit some kind of minor crisis towards the mid-'20s. He was surprised by Richard Reti’s hypermodernism in New York 1924 and, largely as a result of that game, finished well behind Lasker in the tournament. He was badly off-form in Moscow 1925 and needed a torrid second half to finish with the leaders. And Capablanca at this point considered retiring, feeling that chess had become too boring for him.
That torpor seemed to have resolved itself when he won New York 1927 by three full points but it was illusory. Alekhine had spent the 1920s outworking Capablanca and subjecting his play to relentless scrutiny, and that paid off when he outlasted Capablanca at their Buenos Aires match +6-3=25. It would be hard to say that Capablanca’s play in the match was exactly bad, but easy living had clearly caught up with him and he just didn’t quite have the willpower to stay with Alekhine. As he himself admitted, "Dr. Alekhine is worthy of any man's steel."
After that, Capablanca found himself in a new phase of his career — the king-in-exile. He fully expected to have an opportunity for a rematch, but Alekhine wasn’t about to let that happen to him, and he had to spend the rest of his life deprived of his birthright, still playing with astonishing strength but beset by illness. We get an indelible glimpse of what Capablanca’s state of mind would have been when Grigory Levenfish, watching the film Chess Fever in 1935, was astonished to hear loud crying behind him and turned and saw Capablanca sobbing at the sight of himself on screen — at his youth and at everything he had lost.
Capablanca's Style
1.Accuracy in short lines. Players of this era frequently got themselves into trouble when they tried too closely to imitate Capablanca’s crystalline play — which only he seemed to be able to pull off. It was of course understandable that they did this — the clear sense was that Capablanca’s play was close to truth in chess and is very close to how computer plays. The key point, simply, was Capablanca’s dizzying tactical accuracy. “You make no mistakes,” Lasker told him in 1914, and it was rare to see Capablanca make anything close to a miscalculation even in chaotic positions. He seemed never to calculate particularly long lines, but, much like Karpov, to stick to the deadly accurate calculation of short lines — above all, in ‘simple’ positions where tactical accuracy counted the most.
2.Plans in the middegame. Capablanca played the opening with almost complete indifference but around move ten succeeded in formulating a plan that as often as not determined the subsequent course of the game. This was his talent and is very close to the way that, for instance, Boris Spassky also succeeded in orienting himself in any position. If you play through Capablanca games, you’ll notice a stretch where he seems to forego ‘natural moves’ and instead, as soon as the features of the position have become apparent, to engage in a forcing sequence that allows him to determine the subsequent play.
3.Transition to the endgame. Capablanca always seemed to be playing a phase ahead in the game. “His trick was to play with such brilliance in the middlegame that the game was decided — even if the opponent didn't always know it — before the endgame," sniffed Fischer. But of course that’s a real skill that is lacking in most chess players. His sense of the endgame was deep enough that he could picture what the ‘true endgame’ would be from a given position and would usually be able to convert to it without too much trouble.
