🇷🇺 Alexander Alekhine

When Alexander Alekhine arrived in Buenos Aires in September 1927 to challenge José Raúl Capablanca for the World Championship, the chess world expected a formality. Capablanca had not lost a competitive game in eight years. Grandmasters whispered that chess had reached its apex in the Cuban — that the game, played perfectly, would always draw, and that Capablanca was the player who played perfectly. Alekhine, a Russian émigré living in France, was a fine attacking player, perhaps the best combinational talent of his generation, but attacking chess against someone who never made errors was considered a fantasy. What happened in Buenos Aires over the next three months changed everything the chess world believed about itself.

Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine was born into Russian aristocracy on October 31, 1892, in Moscow. His family was wealthy and cultured; his mother taught him chess when he was seven, and he spent his adolescence devouring the games of the great champions. At fifteen he was playing correspondence chess at a high level. At twenty-two he was Russia's strongest player. He survived the Revolution, spent time in a Bolshevik prison, and eventually fled to France, becoming a French citizen in 1925. He had received a doctorate in law from the University of Paris, was fluent in six languages, and possessed a memory for chess games and positions so vast that contemporaries spoke of it with something approaching awe.

His playing style was the antithesis of Capablanca's clarity. Where the Cuban found the clean solution, Alekhine found the most complex one. He created positions of such labyrinthine tactical depth that opponents could not see to the bottom of them. He prepared his openings with an obsessiveness that no player of his era matched, studying his opponents' games exhaustively, identifying weaknesses of temperament and preference, and designing opening systems specifically calculated to exploit those weaknesses. Before Alekhine, World Championship preparation was a matter of general chess improvement. After Alekhine, it was something closer to targeted psychological warfare.

Against Capablanca he spent two years preparing, analyzing every game the Cuban had played, memorizing his tendencies in every position type, and developing novelties in precisely the openings Capablanca preferred. The match itself was thirty-four games long. Capablanca was outplayed methodically. He never recovered his composure. Alekhine won six games to Capablanca's three, with twenty-five draws, and emerged from Buenos Aires as World Champion in what remains the greatest upset in chess championship history.

His games from the championship and from the tournament victories that followed are among the most studied in chess history. His combinations span moves of anticipatory depth that look, in retrospect, like something calculated rather than played over a board, under time pressure, across a long match. The game he chose as his finest — against Bogoljubov in Hastings 1922 — involves a queen sacrifice on move eleven leading to a mating attack of such intricacy that annotators spent decades confirming each variation was correct. It is widely cited as one of the ten most beautiful games ever played.

He lost the title briefly in 1935 to Max Euwe of the Netherlands, reclaimed it two years later in a rematch, and held it until his death in a hotel room in Estoril, Portugal, on March 24, 1946. He was found at his chess board, still in formal attire, dead of a choking accident. He died World Champion, the only holder of the title to die while still reigning. A rematch with Capablanca, requested repeatedly by both men and long anticipated by the chess world, never took place. The rivalry between the two greatest attacking and defensive geniuses of the era remained unresolved.