A Century of Chess: Capablanca Tournaments 1929
Starting around 1929, Capablanca’s life starts to assume the aspect of a tragedy. More than for just about anybody else, there’s a sense with Capablanca of being born with a very particular fate — to be the world champion — and when the title is taken from him, through Alekhine’s hard work and a certain negligence on his own part, Capablanca becomes something like King Lear wandering through the heath or Shoeless Joe Jackson barnstorming under an assumed name.
In 1928, Salo Flohr, observing Capablanca at Bad Kissingen would observe, "I was staggered by his confidence...the loss of a title of world champion is usually the greatest loss for a player." But that self-confidence went only so far. Fedor Bohartichuk, sitting at a screening of Chess Fever in 1935 would hear a bawling, choking sound in the audience and, surprised, would turn and see Capablanca weeping his eyes out. "He was crying about his youth, which is disappearing into eternity every day," Bohartichuk wrote. "He was not a philosopher and could not reconcile himself to the loss."
Capablanca’s 1928 tournaments were played like a tuneup for a renewed shot at the title — "I feel fully confident that I shall regain my title," he told a reporter, "a lot of peace and quiet, some exercise, and a little cold water and I shall be in tiptop shape" — but, as 1929 wore on, it was starting to become clear that Capablanca’s chance for revenge might not materialize. Alekhine had accepted a challenge from Bogoljubow, and a series of petty misunderstandings were jeopardizing negotiations between Capablanca and Alekhine. Capablanca, letting a certain arrogance get the better of him during a discussion of match conditions, had intimated that the result of the 1927 match “merely depended on the physical and mental endurance of the players,” which resulted in a furious retort from Alekhine that “You do not seem to know me very well if you think that anything could induce me to give up what I consider fair sportsmanship.” Meanwhile, a challenge from Capablanca was returned on the grounds that the envelope of the letter had been left unsealed, producing a debate on the etiquette of unsealed letters. With the stock market crash, and then a further deterioration in relations between Alekhine and Capablanca, the return match — at one point definitively scheduled for 1930 — would disappear completely.
Not long after the 1927 match, Capablanca had given vent to some of his inner feelings on chess and said, “At present it is really hard for me to have to be enslaved for five hours in front of a chessboard engaged in intense mental effort which in reality brings me no great personal satisfaction,” but the loss of the title did at least encourage him to play more chess and make his case for the return match.
At a low-key tournament in Budapest, he ran the table with +8-0=5 finishing a point ahead of Rubinstein. At another tournament in Barcelona — the first-ever significant tournament in Spain, timed to the world’s fair — he posted a dizzying +13-0=1. Taken all together, Capablanca in 1928-29 scored +55-3=40, a really stunning record that competed with his best achievements.
From a competitive point of view, these tournaments were an opportunity for Capablanca to experiment with hypermodernism. He had stood above the hypermodern revolution that overlapped so perfectly with his career, but, freed of his world championship responsibilities and perhaps putting a bit more attention to the craft of chess, he seemed to find that the hypermodern systems suited him admirably. His wins over Colle and Yates, for instance, are almost stunning in their simplicity, with Capablanca needing, as it were, to make only one or two moves in placid-looking middlegames for his opponents’ position to be suddenly tied up in knots. The game against Canal, meanwhile, is a demonstration of his creativity in the endgame.
The Budapest and Barcelona tournaments really were glorified exhibitions, with Capablanca and a couple of international masters tearing through a primarily local field. Rubinstein, past his peak but still one of the best in the world, played second fiddle to Capablanca at Budapest, while Tartakower fulfilled that role in Barcelona. Tartakower actually was responsible for the most enduring contribution of the Barcelona tournament. The organizers asked him to invent an opening to celebrate the occasion and he duly devised the Catalan — maybe the single most significant of his opening legacies. He called it “simple but strong.” At Budapest, Tartakower was on the receiving end of the brilliancy prize game, a fun win by Endre Steiner.
Sources: The tournaments are covered from Capablanca's perspective in Miquel Sánchez's José Rául Capablanca.
