A Century of Chess: Alekhine-Capablanca 1927 Part Two
We’ve left the match at its midway point — after Game 17 — with Alekhine leading Capablanca by a game. The players had kicked off a streak of draws at Game 13 and it continued with colorless draws in Games 18 and 19. In the somewhat featureless Queen’s Gambit Declined ending that the players contested so many times in the match, Capablanca in Game 20 finally seemed to be getting somewhere with a dangerous initiative for a sacrificed pawn. But, as so often, Alekhine’s defensive skills came to the rescue and he sacrificed an exchange to neutralize the position.
Capablanca seems to have been psychologically affected by his near-miss, and in Game 21 Alekhine was able to play à la Capablanca, obtaining a small but concrete advantage from the opening, pressing positionally, and then winning with a neat tactical trick. That gave Alekhine a two-point lead and came very near to putting the match away.
Game 22 was one of the more conventionally exciting games of the match, with Alekhine sacrificing a piece for a long-term initiative. With his back to the wall, Capablanca played brilliantly on defense, subtly reorganizing his pieces and then returning enough of the sacrificed material to secure a draw.
After this exertion the players settled in for another run of quiet draws. In Game 23 Capablanca somewhat surprisingly gave himself an isolated pawn out of the opening but Alekhine never was able to take advantage.
Game 24 was one of the more interesting games in this stretch. In the same much-traveled line where Alekhine had found the piece sacrifice in Game 22, he now embarked on a pawn sacrifice for an initiative. The sacrifice was sound but didn’t lead to more than regaining the sacrificed material.
Game 25 never caught fire, with Capablanca pressing a spatial advantage on the queenside but without creating any weaknesses.
Game 26 was a quick grandmaster draw.
Game 27 was, in some psychological sense, the last game of the match. For 37 moves, it was vintage Capablanca, with Capablanca as white pressing down on the b-pawn and then at the right moment switching to a kingside attack. He netted a pawn and only had to avoid black’s remaining spite checks. Instead, on move 38, he blundered by playing 38.Kf2 rather than 38.Ke2 and allowed a perpetual check. Of this game, Capablanca later commented, “I knew then that the jig was up.”
In Game 28 Alekhine found a fresh approach at move 19 in one of the tabiya positions of the match — another case in which the dense theoretical analysis that would later become standard for world championship matches was initiated here. Alekhine’s innovation led to some extra space on the kingside but no real advantage and the game was another draw.
Suddenly, in Game 29, the match got close again. Capablanca’s win was the quintessence of his style, finding a slightly counter-intuitive, concrete plan out of the opening, pressing down hard on the queenside, finally winning a pawn, and then converting in a technically challenging endgame.
In Game 30, Alekhine repeated his opening innovation from the 28th game but without making any further progress in the sleepy rook-and-minor-pieces endgame.
Game 31 was a bad miss for Capablanca. Alekhine, in a sleepy-looking endgame, airily gave up a pawn thinking there was no real risk. But if Capablanca had found an exchange sacrifice — unearthed years later — he had the chance to even the match.
Having failed to score a point with white in 20 games, Alekhine finally accepted that he was getting nowhere with the Orthodox Defense to the Queen’s Gambit Declined and switched to the Exchange Variation of the Queen’s Gambit. He followed that with an impressive opening innovation — developing the knight to e2 rather than the more standard f3 and routing the knight to f5 to support a kingside attack. He won a pawn early and Capablanca missed drawing chances in the somewhat chaotic endgame.
The players took off Game 33 with a grandmaster draw and then Alekhine closed for the kill in Game 34. Alekhine had one more opening innovation, borrowing Capablanca’s idea of 6.a3 in the QGD but retaining complexity in the position with 11.Ne4. Capablanca’s sense of danger let him down in the kind of ‘simple’ middlegame where he usually excelled. Alekhine stole a pawn on the kingside and managed to convert it after a torturous endgame.
It was a titanic match, played at such an extraordinarily high level that it’s difficult for most casual players to appreciate it. It turned on Alekhine’s ability to keep finding ideas in apparently played-out openings, on some miscues by Capablanca in converting favorable middlegames into endings, and above all on Alekhine’s tenacity in defense and sheer will to win. Capablanca and Alekhine would of course have considerable acrimony over Alekhine’s unwillingness to give him a rematch, but Capablanca was gracious in defeat and neatly summarized the match. "Dr Alekhine is worthy of any man's steel. If you don't believe it, try it," he said.
