On Apr 22, 1:32 am, help bot wrote:
On Apr 21, 8:28 am, Taylor Kingston wrote:

Two points:
1. At that point in the match, neither player had won a game -- the
first four were drawn. So one more draw at that point would not have
helped Capablanca win the match.

Hmm. I didn't realize they drew so many games in a row.

The match went D-D-D-D-W-D-D-D-D-W-W-D-D-W, so there were two
streaks of 4 draws in a row. Then, with the score 4-0 in Capa's favor,
Lasker resigned the match, even though it had been planned to last up
to 30 games, says Hannak. Besides feeling he had no chance to beat
Capablanca, Lasker found the Havana heat unendurable, in fact he was
hospitalized for some time after returning to Europe.

Still, my other point remains to be answered;
the one about obeying the rules of the game instead
of cheating at will, as is the fashion today.

I will leave that question to others, since its relevance to Lasker-
Capablanca eludes me.

2. In a way, Capablanca already had "a lock on the title." Lasker
had earlier resigned his World Championship title and given it to
Capa. Therefore, technically, in this match Capablanca was the
defending champion, Lasker the challenger.

That's one take on the issue.

No, it's an historical fact. For example the Hannak biography, page
195, says "Finally, after long and fruitless efforts to come to
mutually satisfactory terms, Lasker threw quite a bombshell by
publishing a statement solemnly renouncing his title for good and
all." This was in 1920, I believe.

My take is that such
a "gift" of the title is quite the opposite; as we saw
with GM Karpov "inheriting" the title from GM
Fischer, the backlash can be worse than hell. The
only surefire way to avoid this kind of thing is to beat
the man, to be the man.

Capablanca obviously felt the same way, and so pressed Lasker all
the more, aided by popular opinion, and also by the hyper-inflation of
German currency in the years immediately following WW I. This pretty
much evaporated Lasker's savings, so when a Havana casino offered him
a minimum guarantee of $11,000, win or lose, Lasker could not afford
to refuse.

Also consider this: if GM
Capablanca were really considered the title-holder
before this match, why go to such lengths to try
and play GM Lasker?

You're right, Capablanca definitely wanted to win the title the
right way, by beating Lasker. I was merely reporting the fact that
Lasker *had* resigned the title before them match, and so,
technically, Capa was *already* champion.

Basically, in 1921 Lasker was burnt out. His play in the 1921 match
was way below his usual standard.

Everyone has a poor performance now and then;
this is no proof of being burnt out. For such a
proof we might look at GM Lasker's lifetime rating
curve, searching for a final, sharp drop from which
he never recovered.

No, for proof of his being burnt out, we can simply turn to the
testimony of those who knew him. To cite Hannak again, page 196: "So
Lasker went to Cuba to play the match, but he didn't feel very happy
about it ... he was far from being imbued with indomitable fighting
spirit that had carried through all his previous tests ..." Another
source is GM Ossip Bernstein, who reported this conversation with
Lasker shortly before he sailed for Havana:

B: "Have you made any preparations for the match?"
L: "No."
B: "Have you taken time out to rest?"
L: "No."
B: "At least you are taking along a chessboard in order to study
chess on the voyage?"
L: "No."
B: "Have you reviewed the openings you will play and studied the
games of Capablanca?"
L: "No."

If this laconic exchange does not indicate burn-out, then at least
neither does it indicate enthusiasm.

The war had been hard on him, he was
tired of chess, and after 27 years of him as champion,

LOL Right -- we are to imagine that the poor man
burned himself out with his multitudinous title defenses
over the course of 27 years! LOL

You have split that sentence improperly. It is a compound sentence,
the last sentence of which is "after 27 years of [Lasker] as champion,
the chess world was pretty tired of him." Anyone well read in chess
history knows this. The public gets tired of the same man winning all
the time, they want to see a new face. Similar situations were
Steinitz-Lasker 1894, Botvinnik-Tal 1960, Karpov-Kasparov 1985. And
the public can be quite fickle; attending the 2003 Kasparov-Karpov
exhibition match in New York, I noticed that most of the crowd who
expressed any favoritism were pro-Karpov, something unthinkable 20
years earlier.

the chess world was pretty tired of him.

As IM Winston
Churchill so succinctly put it: "Chess history is bunk".

That was Henry Ford. In the Chicago Tribune of May 25, 1916, he
said: "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want
tradition. Want to live in the present and the only history that is
worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today."