Jose Raul Capablanca Print, Vintage Scacchi Poster, Cuba Retro Wall Art, Sports Gift, Black and White Sports Print

JOSE RAUL CAPABLANCA — a LostTeams editorial print telling the existing story of Jose Raul Capablanca, 1921-1927.

Jose Raul Capablanca learned the moves at four by watching his father play, and by most accounts pointed out an illegal move in that first game.

He beat the champion of Cuba at twelve.

Between 10 February 1916 and 21 March 1924 he did not lose a single game of serious chess. Eight years. He was playing the strongest players in the world throughout.

In 1921 he took the world championship from Emanuel Lasker, who had held it for twenty-seven years, by four wins to none with ten draws. Lasker resigned the match.

The nickname was the chess machine, and it is the one thing about him that is wrong. Machines calculate. Capablanca did the opposite: he was famous for not calculating deeply, for seeing the right move immediately and simply playing it, and for a technique in simplified positions that other grandmasters described as effortless in a way that was almost annoying.

He was also worried about the game's future. He thought chess was heading for a draw death, in which perfect opening knowledge would make top-level play sterile, and he proposed a larger board with new pieces to fix it. Nobody adopted it, but the diagnosis was taken seriously.

In 1927, at Buenos Aires, he lost the title to Alexander Alekhine over thirty-four games, in the longest world championship match played to that point.

He then spent the rest of his life trying to get a rematch. Alekhine set financial conditions that were never met, and avoided him until his death. It is the most successful piece of avoidance in the history of the sport.

One number gives the scale of it. In his entire career, across roughly six hundred serious games, he lost about thirty-five. Bobby Fischer, who was not generous about predecessors, called his endgame technique the finest there had been.

Capablanca collapsed at the Manhattan Chess Club on 7 March 1942 while watching a game, and died the next morning of a cerebral haemorrhage. He was fifty-three.

Hang it. One day someone will ask you what it is, and you will know where to begin.