Taylor Kingston wrote:
David Richerby wrote:
In the fifth game of the Lasker-Capablanca World Championship match
(1921), the same position[1] occurs after Black's 34th, 36th and
38th moves but the draw was not claimed and Black went on to lose.
Does anyone know why?

An interesting point, Dave. In his annotations to the match,
Capablanca does not even mention the repetition.

I'd be interested to know if any commentators have mentioned it. As I
said, Kasparov also says nothing about it. I guess this isn't one of
the games he analyzed with Fritz: I `found' the repetition when going
through the game using Fritz as a board and it informed me the
position was drawn. My initial thought was that I'd been careless and
turned a two-fold repetition into three-fold.


It would have been up to Lasker, as the player making the move that
creates the third iteration, to claim the draw before making his
38th move. It is possible that he failed to notice threefold
repetition, but it seems unlikely, since the repetitions occur in
direct sequence.

True. On the other hand, the moves that bring about the repeated
position are a pawn move and two king moves -- maybe that threw him
off.


I would suggest that perhaps he chose not to claim the draw, because
he believed he had winning chances.

That's also a possibility, with Capablanca miscalculating. Does Capa
usually come across as being fairly honest in his annotations? Do we
infer that he probably wasn't aware of the possibility of Lasker's
claiming the draw when he wrote the notes?


Dave.

--
David Richerby Laptop Drink (TM): it's like a
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ refreshing juice beverage that you
can put on your lap!