A Century of Chess: New York 1913
When Capablanca comes to mind, you tend to think either of the boy prodigy or of the international playboy, set for life and unassailably world champion. It’s easy to forget the somewhat itinerant New York stage - matriculating at Columbia, then dropping out, uncertain whether to be an engineer or to make a living as a chess master. That period ends with a series of triumphant tournaments in 1913 - the New York National Tournament, the Rice Tournament, and the Havana tournament, in which Capablanca scored a total of +31=5-4 and firmly established himself as the top player in the hemisphere, although still facing a challenge from Marshall. The result was that the Cuban government rewarded him with a sinecure in the foreign office - making him perhaps the world’s only salaried chess professional in the pre-Soviet era, able to play full-time but with an income separate from his winnings.
In New York, he won his first ten games with ridiculous ease, like a concert pianist practicing scales.
The only challenge came from Norman Whitaker, who would later become a con artist, best known for a scam in which he posed as kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. Whitaker won a pawn in the opening but Capablanca kept fighting and took the full point with the aid of time-trouble.
In round 11, though, Capablanca lost to Jaffe, who was having a terrific tournament, and, after a short draw with Chajes, he found himself within striking distance of Marshall, only a half-point ahead and facing his rival in the last round.
It was Marshall’s chance for revenge after their 1909 match, but he accepted a short draw - and his revenge came later that year in a last-round victory over Capablanca in Havana.
The tournament was an outstanding idea - not to be repeated for another thirty years - a kind of Pan-American festival of chess, modeled on the German chess congresses, in that invitations went out to the top local masters but there was no particular focus on nationality - an international master who happened to be available (in this case Janowski) was more than welcome to play.
It was truly an immigrant event - the first time that an American tournament reflected how cosmopolitan the country had become. Of the 14 participants, only four were born in North America and only two in the United States. It was a similar situation to the 1990s where American had little homegrown talent but a surfeit of strong Eastern European masters - in this case mostly Jewish players leaving the Russian Empire.
The tournament may well have been the career high-point for Charles Jaffe, a colorful player who become the archetype of the broke, degenerate American chess master - a very different vibe from Marshall, Pillsbury or Napier, let alone Jackson Showalter.
Jaffe had been a silk-mill merchant and dropped it to be a professional chess player - a truly terrible decision from a financial point of view - but at New York 1913 it seemed reasonable enough. He beat both Capablanca and Janowski, scored 5.5 out of 6 against the top scorers (himself excluded), and uttered his most famous line.
After the game with Capablanca, both players were asked how many moves ahead they could see. Capablanca said, impressively, ‘ten moves.’ Jaffe, on the other hand, insisted that he only ever saw one move ahead - “but always the best one.” (There actually is something to this - if you play through his games, it’s clear that he’s not so much playing the position as playing the tactics, looking for shots around every corner - which would of course become the quintessential American style, coffeehouse chess elevated, from time-to-time, to world-class level.)
And, speaking of which, here are a few games from the tournament that are meant more to be enjoyed than studied - all in the spirit of fighting chess.
Sources: Capablanca discusses the tournament in My Chess Career and in Chess Fundamentals, Marshall in Marshall's Best Games of Chess. Edward Winter has a discussion of Jaffe's famous saying here.
