José Raúl Capablanca

José Raúl Capablanca: The Chess Machine from Havana

In Cleveland in 1922, Capablanca sat down against 103 opponents at once. He won 102 games and drew a single one, a winning percentage no player had recorded in an exhibition of that scale. It was a stunt, and it was also the plainest available statement of what separated him from everyone else in the room: he did not appear to need to think hard in order to be right. Emanuel Lasker, who held the world title for twenty-seven years and lost it to him, said it without qualification. "I have known many chess players, but only one chess genius: Capablanca."

A Boy at the Havana Chess Club

He told the story himself, and it has never quite been verified: at four years old, watching his father — a Spanish army officer garrisoned in Havana — play a friend, he noticed an illegal move, pointed it out, and then beat his father at a game nobody had taught him. He was born on 19 November 1888 at the Castillo del Príncipe in Havana, the second surviving son of José María Capablanca and Matilde María Graupera y Marín. By eight he had been admitted to the Havana Chess Club. In November 1901, weeks before his thirteenth birthday, he played a match against Juan Corzo, the champion of Cuba, and won it.

Columbia, Baseball, and Frank Marshall

In 1905 he passed the entrance examinations for Columbia College and took a place at shortstop on the freshman baseball team — a game he preferred to chess then and said he preferred for the rest of his life. He also joined the Manhattan Chess Club, where he was quickly identified as the strongest player present, and in 1906 he won a rapid tournament ahead of Lasker, the reigning world champion. In 1908 he left the university to play chess full time. He came back in 1910 to read chemical engineering at Columbia's School of Mines, and left that too.

The result that made him international was the 1909 match against Frank Marshall, the United States champion. Capablanca, twenty-one, won it 15–8. Marshall spent the next two years insisting that this unknown Cuban be admitted to Europe's closed elite events.

San Sebastián and the Road to the Title

At San Sebastián in 1911 several established masters formally objected that Capablanca had not earned his place. He then won the tournament outright — six wins, one loss, seven draws — beating Akiba Rubinstein, Aron Nimzowitsch and Siegbert Tarrasch along the way. Negotiations for a world championship match with Lasker began that same year and dragged on for a decade.

In the meantime the Cuban Foreign Office made the arrangement that defined his adult life: in September 1913 he was given a post described as ambassador-at-large, a salaried diplomatic role whose principal duty was to travel, play chess, and be Cuban in public. At New York in 1918 he met Marshall's long-prepared attacking innovation in the Ruy Lopez — the line still called the Marshall Attack — refuted it over the board under ordinary tournament time control, and won.

Eight Years Without a Loss

Between 10 February 1916 and 21 March 1924 Capablanca played sixty-three serious games without losing one: forty wins, twenty-three draws. The streak contained the whole of his world championship match. It ended only when Richard Réti beat him at New York in 1924.

The title itself came in Havana in 1921. Lasker resigned the match after fourteen games, having won none; Capablanca had four wins and ten draws. London 1922 was, if anything, more emphatic — thirteen points from fifteen games, unbeaten, ahead of Alexander Alekhine, Milan Vidmar and Rubinstein. Across his whole adult career he lost thirty-four serious games. Only Marshall, Lasker, Alekhine and Rudolf Spielmann ever beat him twice or more, and against every one of them except Spielmann he finished ahead on lifetime score.

Buenos Aires, 1927

Alekhine had never beaten him. Nobody in Buenos Aires expected the match to be close, least of all the champion. It ran thirty-four games, the longest formal world championship match until Karpov and Kasparov in 1984–85, and Alekhine won it: six wins to three, twenty-five draws. The difference was preparation. Alekhine had studied Capablanca's games exhaustively for years. Capablanca arrived, by every account including his own, without having done comparable work.

He chased a rematch for the rest of his life and never got one; relations with Alekhine curdled into open hostility. He took six tournament first prizes between 1928 and 1931, withdrew from serious play, then attempted a comeback from 1934. It produced real results — outright victory at Moscow in 1936, and a shared first place with Mikhail Botvinnik at Nottingham the same year — but never another title match.

The Writer and the Reformer

His books outlasted his reign. *My Chess Career* (1920) was criticized on publication for its conceit. *Chess Fundamentals* (1921) Botvinnik later called the best chess book ever written. *A Primer of Chess* (1935) advanced the argument, still cited, that a queen and knight generally outplay a queen and bishop in the endgame. He wrote about turning points rather than exhaustive variations, which is how he thought.

He also proposed to redesign the game. Convinced that accumulating opening knowledge would exhaust chess within fifty years, he devised a variant on a ten-by-eight board with two new pieces per side — the archbishop, combining bishop and knight, and the chancellor, combining rook and knight — and tested it against Edward Lasker. He put this forward while he was world champion, not, as is often repeated, as a loser's complaint afterwards.

Why José Is Called a Genius

Two world champions used the word about him without hedging. Lasker: "I have known many chess players, but only one chess genius: Capablanca." Alekhine, who had taken his title and despised him, wrote at his death that chess had lost "a very great chess genius whose like we shall never see again." The quality they were naming was the speed of accurate judgment. Capablanca read a position the way a fluent adult reads a word rather than assembling it from letters. He claimed never to have opened a book of openings. Bobby Fischer called it a "real light touch." Machines agree: a 2006 computer analysis of world championship play found Capablanca the most accurate of all the champions, and Arpad Elo's 1978 statistical survey rated his peak five-year span the strongest then measured.

The honest counter-case is that the gift substituted for work, and eventually work beat it. Alekhine won in 1927 by preparing for years against a man who had never seriously had to; Capablanca had, in a real sense, never learned how to try. His loss column stayed short partly because his judgment steered him toward the simplified, technical positions he read best, and away from the chaos where he might have been out-calculated. *Warriors of the Mind* (1989) ranks him fifth of all time, behind Kasparov, Karpov, Fischer and Botvinnik. He is a genius of intuition, not of industry, and the distinction cost him his title.

Legacy

The hypertension that killed him went undiagnosed until after the AVRO tournament of 1938; by 1940 his blood pressure was measured at 210 over 180. On the evening of 7 March 1942 he collapsed while taking off his coat at the Manhattan Chess Club, where he had been watching a casual game. He died at Mount Sinai Hospital at six the next morning, aged fifty-three, of a thalamic hemorrhage. Havana buried him at the Colón Cemetery on 15 March.

Cuba has held the Capablanca Memorial tournament almost every year since 1962. Boris Spassky, who came four champions later, thought him simply the greatest player who ever lived.

Achievements

• world chess champion