Two Works Of Chess Art And Some Notes By Alekhine

Morning Everyone. Just something quick and simple today - a couple of games that came into my head this week, for different reasons, that I find rather beautiful.

Last time round I mentioned this book.

One game in it really stuck me at the time, and the more I have learned over the last 45 years, the more I like it! Curiously you won't find it in any of the anthologies, or discussions of Anderssen being a combinational monster. It has a similarity to a beautiful game of Morphy's, which IS a standard anthology piece. Go figure.

As I have noted before, Anderssen was a prodigious player of off-hand games. He is said to have played something like 6,000 with Zukertort. The game in question was played during the Easter holidays in 1871, but was of a slightly more serious nature than many of their off-hand games. They played a series of games to test out an idea of Anderssen's in the Evan's Gambit, some of which have been preserved. This one is a beauty!

'Meanwhile far away in another part of town', in the comments on one of my friend kamalakanta's blogs, I mentioned how admired Rubinstein was by his contemporaries. That reminded me of a curious sounding comment by Alekhine about him, and it took just a couple of minutes to find it in the tournament book of Hastings 1922. 

It comes at move 10 of Rubinstein's beautiful win against Tarrasch. The participation of the latter in the tournament is a small story in itself. As the tournament book notes, both Capablanca and Lasker were invited instead, but agreements with them could not be reached. Capablanca was in England for the great London tournament. However, during his time as World Champion, he seems to have demanded rather a high price for his services - at New York 1924, for example, his appearance fee was equal to the amount of the first prize, according to Forster et. al. in a recent book on Lasker.

lasker was not in London - he was deliberately not invited as a lingering result of his patriotic articles in the German press during the war. From memory, he asked the Hastings organisers for £60 to make the trip from Germany worthwhile, and they were unable to come up with that sum.

So, Tarrasch was invited to represent Germany. He was also lined up by the organisers of New York 1924 in case Lasker did not take part.

The book of the Hastings event took a long time to be published, but it must have been worth the wait to get Alekhine's wonderful annotations in print, and I will include his notes to the game in question in full.

I hope you enjoyed the games! Take care everyone.