Alekhine on the blunder---
Dr. Alekhine on Carlsbad 1929
Edward Winter
Article 5/6: New York Times, 28 August 1929, pages 19 and 20:
‘CARLSBAD, Aug. 25. – After the failure of Rudolph [sic] Spielmann of Austria in the middle rounds of the chess tourney here, experts believed that José Capablanca of Cuba would be the winner. Therefore there was a great surprise when it became known, after 20 minutes of play against F. Sämisch, that the Cuban had lost, owing to a gross mistake on the ninth move, losing a major piece [sic] to the German master for only one pawn.
This game, which naturally lost all artistic value, was dragged by Capablanca to the 60th move. However, the inevitable at last happened. It is clear that a master of Capablanca’s class does not need to lose games in such a manner.
While such a mistake never has happened to masters of a less high class, such as A. Nimzowitsch of Denmark and Dr Vidmar of Yugoslavia, in their long careers, negligence with Capablanca is sporadical and nearly typical. Just remember the 1914 St Petersburg game with Tarrasch, the 1916 New York test with Chajes, the London match in 1922 with Morrison, the Moscow test of 1925 against Werlinksy, the 12th game at Buenos Aires in 1927 and the Kissingen match of the same year against Spielmann.
This short statistical outline, which easily could be continued, shows sufficiently that the former world’s champion lacks an important component of chess playing strength, namely an imperturbable attention which separates the player absolutely from the outer world. Therefore, with him, such mistakes as in the Sämisch game cannot be counted as a crash incident.
man vs machine
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