A Century of Chess: Capablanca Tournaments 1928
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The Capablanca tournaments at the end of the 1920s have exactly the aspect of a wine-soaked party after a divorce where everybody is determined to assure the embittered, jilted party that they are in the right about everything and that everything will be sorted out soon.
There were very few alibis after the Buenos Aires match — Alekhine had won fair and square — but the chess world, like with some president for life, liked the idea of Capablanca as world champion. He finished second at Bad Kissingen but cruised through the playing field at Budapest and Berlin, scoring +14-1=17 between the three tournaments. Immediately after Bad Kissingen, with the support of the chess community, Capablanca issued a challenge for a rematch and offering better financial terms than Bogoljubow could provide.
But Alekhine simply wasn’t interested. He hadn’t spent 14 years planning his challenge to Capablanca only to hand the title back to him and — after 34 games in the 1927 match — the players must have been sick to death of the sight of each other. At this time the title of world champion was the property of its owner and Alekhine made use of his rights to accept the challenge of Bogoljubow — who, in any case, had earned a shot through his tournament record. Alekhine, in his notes from the time, was a bit snippy about Capablanca’s abilities. Annotating a game of his from Bad Kissingen, he wrote, "This draw proved that Capablanca in no way played better in Kissingen than he did in Buenos Aires. I am deeply convinced that he could not (or no longer could)."
But that was Alekhine. For mere mortals, Capablanca was indestructible — and playing at such a high level that no one could touch him. His games from Budapest and Berlin have all the joy of a computer program tearing apart a human player. Salo Flohr, who observed Capablanca at Berlin and expected to see him psychologically affected by the Buenos Aires match, was "staggered by his confidence."
Against a field of mainly Hungarian players in Budapest, Capablanca cruised to first, a point ahead of Marshall, who reprised the role of second fiddle to Capablanca that he had played back in the 1910s.
The elite field at Berlin produced the same result, with Capablanca drawing all his games against the top four finishers and then scoring +5-0=1 against the bottom half of the cross table plus a bonus win against Tarrasch.
The tournament was somewhat important for Aron Nimzowitsch, who was staking his claim for a world championship match and had another good result, passing a streaky Spielmann to take clear second.
The tournament, sad to say, was goodbye to a whole generation of players. This was the last tournament of Richard Réti, who would die the next year of scarlet fever. It was the last significant tournament also of Siegbert Tarrasch, who indulged a difficult side of his personality and withdrew from the tournament after the third round citing illness, thus negating the hard work of the three players who had scored points against him. Weak play in the tournament indicated also that both Frank Marshall and Akiba Rubinstein were entering into terminal decline in their chess-playing strength.
Sources: The tournaments are covered from Capablanca's perspective in Miguel Sánchez's José Rául Capablanca: A Chess Biography and from Nimzowitsch's in Rudolf Reinhardt's Aron Nimzowitsch.
