GM Spraggett’s blog (for which I’m forbidden to link because it contains adult graphic content) today has some interesting insights on the 1927 match. Spraggett believes Capa was clearly superior to Alekhine at the time of the match, and actually outplayed the latter most of the time. So, then, why did he lose? Spraggett believes Capa tended to fade and blunder in later phases of the game, similar to the way older players often fail after several hours play. Yet he was only 39 and in pretty good shape. Spraggett introduces evidence Capa was carrying on a late night affair with a certain Argentine movie actress or possibly a singer, and tended to arrive for the games having had very little sleep. I read of Fischer encountering similar problems in an Argentine tournament back around 1960. Hmmm. Casey Stengel had an incisive observation on this: “The trouble is not that players have sex the night before a game. It’s that they stay out all night looking for it.”
The great Irish professional cyclist Sean Kelly’s wife once remarked that it was something of a miracle that they had children born during his long cycling career. Sean was known to abstain for weeks before a race like Paris-Roubaix which he won on multiple occasions.
Lots of excuses are made up for Capablanca’s failure to beat Alekhine in the match. His seeming invincibility was convincing enough to the public, colleagues, and potential sponsors that is was difficult to set up a match, given the conditions that Capablanca had for match play. The answer might be a lot simpler. In several sources, including Alekhine’s books and Mikhail Marin"s “Legends of Chess”, it is stated that Alekhine had spent a considerable period of time going over Capablanca’s tournament games and discovered that there were several flaws in his technique in the endgame. This may have been due to unwillingness to study, laziness, or being self-satisfied that his chess was near perfect. Capablanca once pointed out that at times he felt invincible and that a loss brought him back to earth. It may very well be that it was a well prepared opponent at the right moment in time when the champion was full of pride in himself that set the stage for the great player’s defeat.
In his autobiographies, Alekhine says the he deliberately played into endgames at times to train for a potential match with Capablanca. He worked on his style and technique to become better at match play. In the post match period after 1927, Alekhine went on a tear for a number of years winning tournament after tournament. This was the fruit of all the hard work he did to play Capablanca. The loss of the match must have come as a great shock to Capablanca. He struggled to recover his form at first, and then improved his game considerably trying to get a re-match. Alekhine ducked the match and played Bogolyubov twice and then played Euwe and lost. Alekhine was lucky to have gotten a re-match against the Dutchman who displayed a degree of sportsmanship that his predecessors did not exhibit with potential rivals. Had Euwe played Capablanca first, it is entirely possible that Capablanca would have won since he had defeated Euwe before in a short match. If that had happened, Alekhine would have had to prepare for a more wizened Capablanca. It is anyone’s guess how a re-match between these two aging foes would have gone.