A Century of Chess: Scheveningen 1913
It’s a surprise to me, playing over games from this period, to realize how much Capablanca and Alekhine developed in tandem. Both had their first successes in 1909. Both emerged as international stars in 1911. But Capablanca arrived in international chess as a fully-formed entity - thrashing Marshall in their 1909 match and winning the super-elite San Sebastián tournament in 1911 - while Alekhine for a time was just a promising young player: finishing shared sixth at Hamburg 1910 and shared eighth at Karlsbad 1911. In 1912, he won his first tournament, in Stockholm. In 1913, with a dominating performance at Scheveningen, he put the chess world on notice that he was something special.
Against a mixed field of international players and local Dutch masters, Alekhine cruised, winning his first eight games, ceding a draw to Yates, and winning his next three. He clinched clear first place before the last round, went out to celebrate, and, in a sign of things to come, got very drunk and wasn’t quite himself in his game against Janowski the next day. Where Capablanca played simple chess, foreshortening the opening and middle game as much as possible to arrive at a won ending, Alekhine‘s chess was the opposite - complicated, aggressive, combinational. If Capablanca played half-baked, generic openings, designed solely to bring about a playable middlegame, Alekhine clearly found the opening fascinating - experimenting with all sorts of lines that his mature self would surely have rejected - but doing everything in his power to generate an initiative and to retain it all the way to the endgame.
The other sensation of the tournament was Fred Yates. Yates had a slow start as an international player, finishing last at Hamburg. He had always had tactical ability, but by 1913 he had added ferocity and fearlessness to his qualities. He won his game against Janowski, drew Alekhine, and finished in fourth place with a score of +4, a sign that he had arrived as an elite player.
As for the rest of the crosstable, Janowski finished second, only a half-point behind Alekhine. It’s useful to think of Janowski’s career in stages. He reached his peak around 1900-1905 when he really was one of the very best in the world. Between 1905 and 1911, he lost all sense of risk management - a period that, unfortunately, coincided with his world championship matches against Lasker. By 1913, he was back in form, taking fourth place at New York, third at Havana and second place at Scheveningen, a very dangerous player although never winning a tournament outright.
The easily-overlooked Adolf Olland (the tournament’s unofficial host) took third.
Breyer disappointed, taking sixth place. The tournament was also the introduction of Edward Lasker, who finished an impressive fifth.
Sources: I've fallen out of the habit of saying it, but every write-up in this series is indebted to chessgames.com. Alekhine annotates two of his games in My Best Games of Chess. The tournament is discussed in Jimmy Adams' Gyula Breyer: Chess Revolutionary. The Alekhine inebriation story comes from Edward Lasker's Chess Secrets I Learned From The Masters - although I haven't been able to find a copy of it online.
