Quiz Question (Capablanca)

[Geoff Chandler]

Capablanca lost 5 serious games (simuls do not count ) in England.

I quickly got 3 (including Cap's first loss on English soil. )

I knew I would 'eventually' have guessed the 4th in a minute but the 5th never.
I completely forgot about him. (it was the game lasting 26 moves)

[Christopher Kreuzer]

I would normally cheat by looking this up, but without a database with reliable locations it is difficult to know where to start. But maybe there just aren't that many losses by Capablanca recorded in databases full-stop? And it should be trivial to search for a 26-move loss. I wouldn't know any of these without looking them up. Impressed you know three of them.

OK, using chessgames.com, I found 156 losses by Capablanca as White. But as you say, many are simul games or casual games. Of those games, only 1 was on British soil, the loss to G. A. Thomas in round 2 at the 1934/35 Hastings tournament (that was one I actually have heard of):

https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1224020

There are only 46 losses by Capablanca as Black in the chessgames.com database, presumably because the convention is to take White in simuls. And the other four games are there, including the 26-move game.

The games are from Hastings 1930/31, Hastings 1934/35 (again), Margate 1935, and Nottingham 1936.

I won't give the names of the opponents (I was not really familiar with them, though I recognise the names of the opponents - they are all good games, it was not easy to beat Capablanca!). It is the second game from Hastings 1934/35 that is the 26-move loss that Geoff completely forgot about (it took place in round 5).

Did Capablanca not play in the UK much before the 1930s?

[John Townsend]

As Christopher said, and I think the opponents were: Sultan Khan, Sir George Thomas, Lilienthal, Reshevsky and Flohr.

Christopher asks: "Did Capablanca not play in the UK much before the 1930s?" He went through unbeaten at London, 1922, Hastings, 1919, and Hastings, 1929-30 (and possibly at other tournaments).

[Christopher Kreuzer]

As Christopher said, and I think the opponents were: Sultan Khan, Sir George Thomas, Lilienthal, Reshevsky and Flohr.

Christopher asks: "Did Capablanca not play in the UK much before the 1930s?" He went through unbeaten at London, 1922, Hastings, 1919, and Hastings, 1929-30 (and possibly at other tournaments).

Amazing. All correct. And thanks for the pre-1930s recap.

The Lilienthal game is a lovely queen sacrifice.

Interesting anecdote in the Flohr game:

"Max Euwe, who stood close to the table, spoke several times to Flohr, telling him the number of moves remaining to be made. [...] As I requested him to keep quiet, he started to argue with me, and tried to persuade me that he was entitled to speak. This interference on the part of Euwe was absolutely inadmissible ; but the tournament director was at that time busy with his own correspondence, and as a result of this interference, I made a grave error, losing the exchange" (J. R. Capablanca).

[Geoff Chandler]

That's it.

Sultan Khan and Sir George too me are more famous.

Reshevsky I instantly knew because recently I had cause to look in his book of games
to answer a query and hung about in there for a while and went over the Capa gane.

Flohr I would have got (...eventually) but Lilienthal only after exhausting every player I ever knew from that era
in alphabetical order and even then would have probably jumped from both Laskers to Levenfish then onto the M's.

[John Townsend]

A number of handy tournament tables appear in the appendices of P.W. Sergeant's A Century of British Chess. However, they stop at 1934, when the book was published.