London 1922

London 1922

by Geza Maróczy

Foreword by Andy Soltis

The

1921

World Chess

Championship Match

José Raúl Capablanca, Challenger

Emanuel Lasker, Champion

by José Raúl Capablanca

2010

Russell Enterprises, Inc.

Milford, CT USA

London 1922

by Geza Maróczy

and

The 1921 World Chess Championship Match

José Raúl Capablanca, Challenger

Emanuel Lasker, Champion

by José Raúl Capablanca

ISBN: 978-1-888690-61-3

© Copyright 2010

Russell Enterprises, Inc.

All Rights Reserved

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Cover design by Janel Lowrance

Editing and Proofreading: Hanon Russell and David Kaufmann

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

London 1922

Foreword by Andy Soltis

Round I

Round II

Round III

Round IV

Round V

Round VI

Round VII

Round VIII

Round IX

Round X

Round XI

Round XII

Round XIII

Round XIV

Round XV

The 1921 World Chess Championship Match Capablanca vs. Lasker

Game 1

Game 2

Game 3

Game 4

Game 5

Game 6

Game 7

Game 8

Game 9

Game 10

Game 11

Game 12

Game 13

Game 14

Indexes

Foreword

There was a time when tournaments were not judged simply by the word category followed by Roman numerals. This was before FIDE ratings and FIDE titles, and even before FIDE. A tournament was remembered for other reasons and one of those reasons was if it was memorialized in a great tournament book.

That helps explain why London 1922 achieved its reputation whereas Pistyan 1922 or Hastings 1922 or any of a number of other great events held between the two world wars have been largely tossed into history’s outbox. But there are other reasons why London 1922 should be remembered. They begin with José Capablanca.

He was the superstar of chess in 1922 and London was his first serious chess in the 15 months since he won the championship title from Emanuel Lasker. Long before Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov, Capa was the chessplayer whom even non-players could identify. His appearance accounts for what this book’s introduction called the very welcome surprise of a very large and wholly unprecedented turnout of spectators.

The tournament was not only Capa’s return to the game that desperately needed his celebrity status. It was also something of a revival of international chess after four years of war and four more of recovery. Some grandmasters were meeting one another for the first time in nearly a decade. Capablanca, for example, hadn’t played Alexander Alekhine or Akiba Rubinstein since the landmark St. Petersburg 1914 tournament and had never played a tournament game against new stars such as Richard Réti and Yefim Bogolyubov.

And what about the ex-champion? It has never been made clear if Lasker was invited to London. More likely he was snubbed because of feelings, lingering and hard, about Germany and the Great War. Nevertheless ten of the invitees could be considered to be among the world’s elite. They were competing for a first prize of 250 pounds, a huge sum for the time. To certify the significance of the event, the strongest British tournament since London 1899, it was officially opened by Andrew Bonar Law, who became prime minister in October, two months later.

Before it began Savielly Tartakower wrote a prescient article about a developing rivalry for a Viennese newspaper: In the course of the last year an exceptionally dangerous opponent to Capablanca appeared in the form of the Muscovite Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine. He said a future Capablanca-Alekhine world championship match would surely be a historic event, pitting great cultures against one another: the proud west and the rapidly developing east. He added: At the time of the London competition the better chances, in my opinion, will be on the side of the brave Muscovite.

This is where the rivalry truly began. It was apparent from the first rounds. Capablanca won his first six games and Alekhine won his first five. When they met in round nine the Cuban stood at 7-1 and Alekhine was a half-point behind. They remained close in the standings while third place was largely a battle between Akiba Rubinstein and Milan Vidmar. The two eastern Europeans started with identical results, a draw followed by four wins. Rubinstein fell behind when he was upset by H.E. Atkins in round six. He made up for it by beating Vidmar three rounds later. But Vidmar edged him out on the final day.

Two curious events occurred in the eighth round. Capablanca hadn’t lost a game in six years but it appeared that Tartakower had chances of ending the streak, in one of the first examples of the variation of the Queen’s Gambit Declined which became known as the Tartakower-Makagonov-Bondarevsky Defense. After the game was drawn the world champion claimed he was the one who must have missed a win. You are lacking in solidity, he told his opponent. That is my saving grace, Tartakower replied, according to his best-game collection.

The other curiosity was the game Bogolyubov-Alekhine. The tournament book stops at move 70 but adds that it was continued to move 120 when a draw was agreed. Other sources say the game ended at move 70, when White had a rook and pawn to Black’s rook and bishop. If Alekhine dragged the game out it may explain how his feud with Bogo began. But another explanation comes from the next round when Alekhine and Capablanca drew in 17 moves. Bogolyubov accused them of agreeing to the draw in advance, outraging Alekhine.

That was one of the few grandmaster draws. In fact, only 32 of the 120 games were drawn. Instead, London 1922 was rich in instructive games. Alekhine annotated four of his eight wins in his first game collection. Don’t miss the finish of his remarkable defeat of F.D. Yates, game 74. Other endgames you should check out are in games 9, 22, 26, 77, 81 and 83. For lovers of attack, go to games 20, 21, 44, 78 and 93. Those who prefer strategy and defense may like games 28, 35 and 40.

The presence of Alekhine, Réti and 21-year-old Max Euwe helped make this one of the first hypermodern tournaments. Look at game 24 and you can appreciate how the King’s Indian Defense (which became a Pirc by transposition) could be an awesome weapon against a classically trained opponent. It was like a mismatch of machine gun versus bow and arrow. Réti’s handling of the King’s Indian against Rubinstein (game 4) is also impressive. Other hypermodern games of note are 10, 34, 38, 53, 98 and 104. You can see London 1922 as a transitional event that helped set the scene for Réti’s introduction of 1 Nf3!.

The other legacy of London 1922 concerns something that happened away from the board. On August 9, a free day between the seventh and eighth rounds, Capablanca invited the seven other strongest players in the tournament to meet him at cocktail hour at one of London’s priciest hotels. Over champagne and small talk he revealed the reason for this extraordinary get-together. He had devised an elaborate set of rules for conducting future world championship matches. There was little dissent and the result has been known as the London Agreement, the London Accord or, simply, the London Rules, and the issues Capa raised are still being debated today. Lets see why:

The London Rules

The main provisions were:

(1) Any of the recognized international masters who can raise the designated prize money can challenge the champion. The champion must play the challenger within a year.

This was a remarkable advance at the time. Today such a rule would be highly controversial, if not denounced as outrageous.

It was an advance in 1922 because there were no rules for world championship challenges before then. Everything had been negotiated ad hoc and the terms depended on the champion’s whim. A champion could take himself out of action for years, as Lasker (and later Kasparov) did. He could pick his challenger and ignore others (as Kasparov did). He could change his demands for the prize fund.

Capablanca wanted to do away with this haphazard way of doing business. His idea would codify transparency into the world championship. Nevertheless, this provision would be criticized sharply if it were implemented today.

Why? Because we prefer the democratic principle of FIDE, the world federation that was established in 1924. The principle holds that the challenger must qualify through elimination events for which, at least theoretically, everyone in the world is eligible. (FIDE’s championships followed this principle, with the notable exceptions of those in 1948 and 2005.)

But there are other questions that Capablanca’s rule raised. When FIDE took over the championship in 1948, it required the titleholder to defend himself after three years, when his challenger had been chosen by the elimination process of zonal, interzonal and candidates tournaments.

But what if the champion wants to play sooner than three years? After all, the biggest payday in chess is a championship match. What if a champion wanted to be paid more often?

This question was ignored during the 1950s and 1960s when there was a parade of Soviet champions, who weren’t allowed to talk about money. But Fischer became champion in 1972 and said he intended to defend his title more often. There were indications that FIDE would be sympathetic as long as Fischer remained committed to defending his title in 1975 against the FIDE-qualified challenger. In other words, there could be two routes to the championship: by personal challenge and through FIDE’s system.

When Fischer vanished from chess, so did the issue he raised. But it may not be gone for good. FIDE considered a Capa-like rule in 2005: Anyone who had a 2700 rating and could raise a $1 million prize fund could challenge the champion. Then-champion Veselin Topalov welcomed the idea, and one member of the 2700-club, Teimor Radjabov, obtained commitments for $1 million for a Topalov-Radjabov world championship match.

But there was little support for and much antagonism to the 2700 rule. And before it could be implemented, Topalov had to play the championship reunification match against Vladimir Kramnik. Kramnik won and showed no interest whatsoever in the 2700 rule. Yet one wonders if the principle of Capablanca’s rule is really dead.

(2) Draws don’t count in the match. Play continues until someone scores six victories and is declared champion.

This was Capablanca’s answer to the perennial dispute over the two basic formats for a match, minimum-win versus maximum-game.

Under the minimum-win format, a match continues until one player scores a prescribed number of victories, such as eight or ten in the Wilhelm Steinitz and Emanuel Lasker matches. Draws don’t count, and the player who is behind can stave off defeat by drawing.

Under maximum-game, the match is limited to a prescribed length, such as the ten games of the 1910 Lasker-Schlechter match. Draws do count and a player who gets a lead benefits by drawing.

Capablanca’s endorsement of minimum-win at London was hardly surprising because that format had been fairly common before he became champion. His choice of six wins is understandable because of his experience in his 1908 match with Frank Marshall. It was an eight-win match and after Marshall lost seven of the first 13 games, he began playing conservatively and dragged the match out another ten games.

What Capablanca didn’t anticipate was that even achieving six victories was becoming difficult at the highest level. The only match ever held according to the London Rules, Alekhine-Capablanca in 1927, lasted 34 games and became the longest championship match up to that time.

What is often overlooked is that the two formats can be combined. Alekhine’s post-Capa matches were limited to 30 games. But the winner had to score six wins and score 15 points.

Today minimum-win is discredited. It resurfaced after 1972 when FIDE switched from a best-of-24-game formula to a six-win format. But that lasted only two matches before the infamous 48-game marathon of Karpov-Kasparov made everyone