Isaak and Vladimir Linder, José Raúl Capablanca: 3rd World Chess Champion (Russell Enterprises, 2010). 272 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.
José Raúl Capablanca (1888-1942) was one of the all-time greats, obviously, but as his life recedes ever farther into the past, he becomes more a mere name and less a personality of interest to the general chess world. This is a pity not only because of his merits, but because it is our loss. His masterpieces, and there are many, are both beautiful and instructive. Indeed, Capablanca was a major influence on Botvinnik (who in turn helped train Karpov, Kasparov and Kramnik!) and Fischer, so how could we fail to benefit from the study of his games?
There is of course some English-language material on Capablanca that's fairly easy for most of us to find: the section in volume 1 of Garry Kasparov's My Great Predecessors series, along with Fred Reinfeld's 1942 work The Immortal Games of Capablanca and Irving Chernev's Capablanca's Best Chess Endings, published in 1978. Not to be overlooked are Capa's own books, including the primer Chess Fundamentals and his 1920 volume My Chess Career. (There are more books; I'm just listing the usual suspects, to which the access is easiest.) So there's certainly room in the chess marketplace for a new life and games work on the great Cuban.
Enter the Linders, a father-and-son duo of Russian chess historians. What they offer is a book that fills the aforementioned void, and offers something new - at least new to me. There are the games and game fragments (87 of them), the usual accounts that Capablanca played here and then he played there, and neither aspect is new or earth-shattering. What is nice, however, and - importantly - new is that they draw on a lot of information from Russian and Russian-language sources. Capablanca played in four significant tournaments in Russia/the Soviet Union (St. Petersburg 1914 and the Moscow tournaments of 1925, 1935 and 1936), and of course Russian chess players were interested in and wrote about him even when he wasn't playing there. So even readers familiar with the old sources will learn something new and gain a fuller picture of his career. Those of you with no material on Capablanca may want to consider getting the book to fill the gap, but those of us who do have material about him should consider getting it anyway, on account of the Russian perspectives.
I do have some criticisms, as usual. First, the editing and/or copy editing in this book is pretty bad. Here are some examples, which could be easily multiplied:
Page 20: In the second annotation to Capablanca-Marshall, New York m(2) 1909, it should be White, not Black, who has problems developing his bishop. Later on the page, 17.Rae8 is given; it should be 17...Rae8. And likewise, on page 22, in a note to the fifth game of the aforementioned match, we're told "And of course not 33.Kh8??", but it should be 33.Kh1. (Sadly, there are quite a few errors of this sort.) On the same page, a new game from that match begins, also labeled game 5. It's in fact game 6.
A different sort of error: on page 26 (and elsewhere) we have "Nimzovitch" rather than the correct "Nimzowitsch". And here's still another sort of error: On page 146, we learn this about a series of simuls given in Moscow: "He played a total of one hundred forty-six games with the result +106, -25, =16." (Now that's the kind of math only a politician could love.)
That's all minutiae, of course, and I haven't forgotten errare humanum est. But there's far too much of it. My second complaint is more significant: the game annotations are pretty weak. Fortunately, in the Linders' brand-new book on Emanuel Lasker, German GM Karsten Müller handles those duties. Here, however, the annotations are generally pretty light - often too light to be of any real instructional value - and don't (or only barely) take recent commentary into account.
Third, there are some rather goofy comments that just leave me scratching my head. On pages 81, in a note to the fifth game of the Lasker-Capablanca match, we have this note to Black's 7th move, 7...b6 in a Queen's Gambit Declined: "It is interesting that Karpov, too, fianchettoed his queen's bishop in several games of his world championship matches", and there then follows all 20 moves of game 34 of Karpov's 1984 match with Kasparov. Why exactly this is "interesting" and why Karpov is singled out eludes me, as the variation chosen by Karpov in that game (the Tartakower Variation of the Queen's Gambit Declined) has been played in tens of thousands of grandmaster games, and by world champions aplenty: 10 times by Tal, 12 times by Petrosian, 53 times by Spassky, 3 times by Fischer, 28 times by Karpov, 16 times by Kasparov, and 9 times by Kramnik, to pick the most prominent cases.
On page 101, in the comments to Capablanca-Tartakower, New York 1924 (the famous rook ending with 35.Kg3), they suggest that Black pursued exchanges in hopes of a draw, but on move 23 they write that Tartakower could have gone for a rook ending, "but as Tartakower himself noted, 'all rook endings are drawn.'" This statement is bizarre on at least two counts: they had just suggested that Black was playing for a draw, but now, in a worse position, he's not? And second, the game winds up in a rook ending after all, and Capa wins it. If the Tartakower quote was meant ironically, that would be one thing, but there's nothing about the context suggesting that it was. (Perhaps this is a failure of translation?)
For a while these quirks and errors drove me slightly crazy, but the book's pluses eventually won me over. Overall, I think the book is worth getting for those with any interest in chess history in general and Capablanca in particular - especially if this is your first book about him. I do hope that Russell Enterprises puts out a second edition at some point, cleaning up all the errors and perhaps redoing the annotations.