José Raúl Capablanca

José Raúl Capablanca y Graupera (November 19, 1888 – March 8, 1942) was a Cuban chess player who was world chess champion from 1921 to 1927. One of the greatest chess players of the twentieth century, he was renowned for his exceptional end game skill and speed of play. Due to his achievements in the chess world, mastery over the board and his relatively simple style of play he was nicknamed the "Human Chess Machine".

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Childhood

José Raúl Capablanca, the second surviving son of an army officer, was born in Havana on November 19, 1888. According to Capablanca, he learned the rules of the game at the age of four by watching his father play, pointed out an illegal move by his father, and then beat his father twice. At the age of eight he was taken to Havana Chess Club, which had hosted many important contests, but on the advice of a doctor he was not allowed to play frequently. Between November and December 1901, he narrowly beat the Cuban Chess Champion, Juan Corzo, in a match. However in April 1902 he only came fourth out of six in the National Championship, losing both his games against Corzo.

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Early adult career

Capablanca's skill in rapid chess lent itself to simultaneous exhibitions, and his increasing reputation in these events led to a USA-wide tour in 1909. Playing 602 games in 27 cities, he scored 96.4% ? a much higher percentage than that of previous players, for example, Géza Maróczy's 88% and Frank Marshall's 86% in 1906. As a result of this performance, he gained sponsorship for an exhibition match that same year against Marshall, the US champion, who had won the 1904 Cambridge Springs tournament ahead of World Champion Emanuel Lasker and Dawid Janowski, and whom Chessmetrics ranks as one of the world's top three players at his peak. Capablanca beat Marshall by 15?8 (8 wins, 1 loss, 14 draws) ? a margin comparable to what Emanuel Lasker achieved against Marshall (8 wins, no losses, 7 draws) in winning his 1907 World Championship match. After the match, Capablanca said that he had never opened a book on chess openings.

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Capablanca made a clean score in the 1910 New York State Championship, winning all seven games. Marshall, invited to play in a tournament at San Sebastián, Spain, in 1911, insisted that Capablanca also be allowed to play.

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According to David Hooper and Ken Whyld, San Sebastián 1911 was "one of the strongest five tournaments held up to that time", as all the world's leading players competed except the World Champion, Lasker, who was inactive in serious play at the time.

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In 1913, Capablanca won a tournament in New York with 11/13, half a point ahead of Marshall. The 600 spectators naturally favored their native hero, but sportingly gave Marshall "thunderous applause". His first instructions were to go to Saint Petersburg ? where he was due to play in a major tournament.

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After the breakdown of his attempt to negotiate a title match in 1911, Capablanca drafted rules for the conduct of future challenges, which were agreed by the other top players at the 1914 Saint Petersburg tournament, including Lasker, and approved at the Mannheim Congress later that year. The main points were: the champion must be prepared to defend his title once a year; the match should be won by the first player to win six or eight games, whichever the champion preferred; and the stake should be at least £1,000 (worth about £347,000 or $700,000 in 2006 terms). and Marshall had the advantage of using a prepared variation. Nevertheless, Capablanca found a way through the complications and won. Capablanca was challenged to a match in 1919 by Borislav Kosti?, who had come through the 1918 tournament undefeated to take second place. The match was to go to the first player to win eight games, but Kosti? resigned the match after losing five straight games. Lasker then resigned the title on June 27, 1920, saying, "You have earned the title not by the formality of a challenge, but by your brilliant mastery." When Cuban enthusiasts raised $20,000 to fund the match provided it was played in Havana, Lasker agreed in August 1920 to play there, but insisted that he was the challenger as Capablanca was now the champion. Capablanca signed an agreement that accepted this point, and soon afterwards published a letter confirming it.

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The match was played in March?April 1921; Lasker resigned it after just fourteen games, having lost four games and won none.

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The press regarded neither Lasker's 1920 resignation of the championship, nor Capablanca's acceptance, as legitimate. Edward Winter, after a lengthy summary of the facts, concludes that, "The press was dismissive of Lasker's wish to confer the title on Capablanca, even questioning the legality of such an initiative, and in 1921 it regarded the Cuban as having become world champion by dint of defeating Lasker over the board."); 20% of the purse was to be paid to the title holder and the remainder divided, 60% going to the winner of the match, and 40% to the loser; the highest purse bid must be accepted. Alekhine, Efim Bogoljubow, Geza Maroczy, Richard Reti, Rubinstein, Tartakower and Vidmar promptly signed them. In the period 1921-1923, Alekhine, Rubinstein and Nimzowitsch all challenged Capablanca, but only Alekhine could raise the US $10,000 Capablanca demanded and only for a match in 1927.

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In 1922, Capablanca also gave a simultaneous exhibition in Cleveland against 103 opponents, the largest in history up to that time, winning 102 and drawing one - setting a record for the best winning percentage ever in a large simultaneous exhibition.

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After beginning with four draws, followed by a loss, Since Nimzowitsch had challenged before Alekhine, Capablanca gave Nimzowitsch until January 1, 1927 to deposit a forfeit in order arrange a match. When this did not materialize, a Capablanca?Alekhine match was agreed, to begin in September 1927.

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In the New York 1927 chess tournament, played from February 19 to March 23, 1927, six of the world's strongest masters played a quadruple round robin, with the others being Alekhine, Rudolf Spielmann, Milan Vidmar, Nimzowitsch and Marshall, According to Capablanca's second wife, Olga, his first marriage broke down fairly soon, and he and Gloria had affairs. Both his parents died during his reign, his father in 1923 and mother in 1926. won the first brilliancy prize against Rudolf Spielmann, and won two games against Nimzowitsch.

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The only match played under those rules was Capablanca vs Alekhine in 1927, although there has been speculation that the actual contract might have included a "two-game lead" clause. Alekhine, Rubinstein and Nimzowitsch had all challenged Capablanca in the early 1920s, but only Alekhine could raise the US $10,000 Capablanca demanded and only in 1927.

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Losing the title

Since Capablanca had won the New York 1927 chess tournament overwhelmingly and had never lost a game outright to Alekhine, he was regarded by most pundits as the clear favorite in their World Chess Championship 1927 match. Capablanca entered the match with no technical or physical preparation, and had thoroughly studied Capablanca's play. According to Kasparov, Alekhine's research uncovered many small inaccuracies, which occurred because Capablanca was unwilling to concentrate intensely. Vladimir Kramnik commented that this was the first contest in which Capablanca had no easy wins. Lud?k Pachman suggested that Capablanca, who was unused to losing games or to any other type of setback, became depressed over his unnecessary loss of the eleventh game, a long, gruelling endgame, featuring errors by both players.

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Immediately after winning the match, Alekhine announced that he was willing to give Capablanca a return match, on the same terms that Capablanca had required as champion ? the challenger must provide a stake of US $10,000, of which more than half would go to the defending champion even if he was defeated. Alekhine, Rubinstein and Nimzowitsch had all challenged Capablanca in the early 1920s but only Alekhine could raise the US $10,000 Capablanca demanded and only in 1927.

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Return to competitive chess

Capablanca had not considered divorcing his first wife, as he had never intended to re-marry. His second wife, Olga, wrote that they met in the late spring of 1934; by late October were deeply in love, and Capablanca recovered his ambition to prove he was the world's best player. He tied for second place at Semmering in 1937, then could only finish seventh of the eight players at the 1938 AVRO tournament, Capablanca's high blood pressure was not correctly diagnosed and treated until after the AVRO tournament, and caused him to lose his train of thought towards the end of playing sessions. While Capablanca and Alekhine were both representing their countries in Buenos Aires, Capablanca made a final attempt to arrange a World Championship match. Alekhine declined, saying he was obliged to be available to defend his adopted homeland, France, as World War II had just broken out. Also, Alekhine sat out the match when the teams from Cuba and France faced each other in the Buenos Aires Olympiad, thus declining an opportunity to meet Capablanca once more.

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Final years

On 7 March 1942, Capablanca was observing a skittles game and chatting with friends at the Manhattan Chess Club in New York City, when he asked for help removing his coat, and collapsed shortly afterwards. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he died at 6 a.m. the next morning. The cause of death was given as "a cerebral haemorrhage provoked by hypertension". Capablanca's great rival Emanuel Lasker had died in the same hospital only a year earlier. Capablanca's body was given a public funeral in Havana's Colón Cemetery on March 15, 1942. In fact, only Marshall, Lasker, Alekhine and Rudolf Spielmann won two or more serious games from the mature Capablanca, though in each case, their overall lifetime scores were minus (Capablanca beat Marshall +20 -2 =28, Lasker +6 -2 =16, Alekhine +9 -7 =33), except for Spielmann who was level (+2 -2 =8). Of top players, only Keres had a narrow plus score against him (+1 -0 =5). Keres' win was at the AVRO 1938 chess tournament, during which tournament Capablanca turned 50, while Keres was 22.

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Statistical ranking systems place Capablanca high among the greatest players of all time. Nathan Divinsky and Raymond Keene's book Warriors of the Mind (1989) ranks him fifth, behind Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer and Mikhail Botvinnik ? and immediately ahead of Emanuel Lasker. In his 1978 book The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present, Arpad Elo gave retrospective ratings to players based on their performance over the best five-year span of their career. He concluded that Capablanca was the strongest of those surveyed, with Lasker and Botvinnik sharing second place. Chessmetrics (2006) is rather sensitive to the length of the periods being compared, and ranks Capablanca between third and fourth strongest of all time for peak periods ranging in length from one to fifteen years. Its author, the statistician Jeff Sonas, concluded that Capablanca had more years in the top three than anyone except Lasker, Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov ? although Alexander Alekhine had more years in the top two positions. A 2006 study claimed to show that Capablanca was the most accurate of all the World Champions when compared with computer analysis of World Championship match games. However, this analysis was criticized for using a second-rank chess program, Crafty, modified to limit its calculations to six moves by each side, and for favoring players whose style matched that of the program.

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Boris Spassky, World Champion from 1969 to 1972, considered Capablanca the best player of all time. Bobby Fischer, who held the title from 1972 to 1975, admired Capablanca's "light touch" and ability to see the right move very quickly. Fischer reported that in the 1950s, older members of the Manhattan Chess Club spoke of Capablanca's performances with awe.

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Capablanca excelled in simple positions and endgames, and his positional judgment was outstanding, so much so that most attempts to attack him came to grief without any apparent defensive efforts on his part. However, he could play great tactical chess when necessary ? most famously in the 1918 Manhattan Chess Club Championship tournament (in New York) where Marshall sprang a deeply-analyzed prepared variation on him, which he refuted while playing under the normal time limit (although ways have since been found to strengthen the Marshall Attack). He was also capable of using aggressive tactical play to drive home a positional advantage, provided he considered it safe and the most efficient way to win, for example against Spielmann in the 1927 New York tournament.

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Influence on the game

Capablanca founded no school per se, but his style was very influential in the games of two world champions: Fischer and Anatoly Karpov. Botvinnik also wrote how much he learned from Capablanca, and pointed out that Alekhine had received much schooling from him in positional play, before their fight for the world title made them bitter enemies.

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As a chess writer, Capablanca did not present large amounts of detailed analysis, instead focusing on the critical moments in a game. His writing style was plain and easy to understand. ? the bishop merely mimics the queen's diagonal move, while the knight can immediately reach squares the queen cannot. Botvinnik credits Capablanca as the first with this insight. Recent research is divided over Capablanca's conclusion: in 2007, Glenn Flear concluded that queen plus bishop is stronger, while in 1999, Larry Kaufman, analysing a large database of games, concluded that results very slightly favored queen plus knight. John Watson wrote in 1998 that an unusually large proportion of queen and knight versus queen and bishop endings are drawn, and that most decisive games are characterized by the winning side having one or more obvious advantages in that specific game.

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Personality

Early in his chess career, Capablanca had received some criticism, mainly in Britain, for the allegedly conceited description of his accomplishments in his first book, My Chess Career. He therefore took the unprecedented step of including virtually all of his tournament and match defeats up to that time in Chess Fundamentals, together with an instructive group of his victories. Nevertheless his preface to the 1934 edition of Chess Fundamentals is confident that "reader may therefore go over the contents of the book with the assurance that there is in it everything he needs."

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"Morphy and Capablanca had enormous talent, Steinitz was very great too. Alekhine was great, but I am not a big fan of his. Maybe it's just my taste. I've studied his games a lot, but I much prefer Capablanca and Morphy. Alekhine had a rather heavy style, Capablanca was much more brilliant and talented, he had a real light touch. Everyone I've spoken to who saw Capablanca play still speak of him with awe. If you showed him any position he would instantly tell you the right move. When I used to go to the Manhattan Chess Club back in the fifties, I met a lot of old-timers there who knew Capablanca, because he used to come around to the Manhattan club in the forties ? before he died in the early forties. They spoke about Capablanca with awe. I have never seen people speak about any chess player like that, before or since. Capablanca really was fantastic. But even he had his weaknesses, especially when you play over his games with his notes he would make idiotic statements like 'I played the rest of the game perfectly.' But then you play through the moves and it is not true at all. But the thing that was great about Capablanca was that he really spoke his mind, he said what he believed was true, he said what he felt." ? Bobby Fischer, Icelandic Radio Interview, 2006

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Cuba: The Republic of Cuba consists of the island of Cuba (the largest of the Greater Antilles), the Isle of Youth and various adjacent small islands. The name of the island is derived from the Taino word "cubanac?n", meaning a central place. It is located in the northern Caribbean at the confluence of t...

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