A Century of Chess: Margate 1935

With any other great player who had any more glamor, Margate would be a big event in chess history — 23-year-old Sammy Reshevsky leaving the US for the first time as an adult, traveling to Europe, and defeating Capablanca in his first international tournament, a game by which he decisively announced his arrival in elite chess. But with Reshevsky’s striking lack of sparkle, the kind of début that is renowned in American players like Morphy, Pillsbury, Capablanca, or Fischer, is almost unremembered. 

To be fair, Margate was a weaker tournament than the site of where the other American legends made their European débuts. It was mostly local British players in addition to Capablanca, who was showing signs of rust in his return to chess after a four-year absence. Reshevsky and Capablanca raced through the field, both playing in an airtight positional way. Reshevsky drew one more game than Capablanca, but their individual game was decisive, a case of Capablanca being out-Capablanca-ed, with Reshevsky playing carefully and positionally and calculating the tactics with slightly more precision. The Reshevsky-Mieses game is discussed in surprising length, by the way, in Walter Tevis’ The Queen’s Gambit with a character using it as an illustration of how to play the Caro-Kann. 

For Capablanca in the silver years of his career, the tournament was an opportunity to shake off some of the accumulated dust and to get himself back into shape for a very successful campaign in 1936. 

Sources: Reshevsky discusses the tournament in Reshevsky on Chess. @Spektrowski provides Benjamin Blumenfeld's annotation of the Reshevsky-Capablanca game here. The British Chess Magazine coverage of the tournament is posted here.