On Apr 22, 10:54 am, Taylor Kingston wrote:

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.

Whoa! If GM Lasker were physically incapacitated
while in Cuba, he would have been hospitalized there,
per common sense. Only a reasonably well man would
dare venture to cross the Atlantic back then -- or a darned
fool, or a man running from something.


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.

It also seems to "elude" the apologists for modern GMs,
who cheat this way virtually at will.


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.

You miss the point; when a world champion makes
a public statement surrendering "his" title, the public
is not compelled to go along willingly. Many writers
have argued either side of this issue, some considering
a verbal surrender binding, and others not. One might
liken it to a surrender during wartime; sure, the hands
are in the air, but until the prisoner is securely in a cage
the possibilities are wide open. There is nothing to stop
a man from later claiming he was somehow cheated,
but an OTB victory usually quashes this possibility.


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,

Really? I wasn't aware that he had accumulated any,
as you call it, "savings". (snicker)


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.

Technically, there was no undisputed authority to
decide such a matter back then; it was largely a
matter of public opinion. Thank god for FIDE. (LOL!)


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.

Oh, gawd! This is like turning to Anthony Saidy to
determine which chess columnist was the greatest
of all time! LOL [GM Evans, he merely opined.]


To cite Hannak again,

...is to reveal an uncanny ignorance of the bias of
that writer. I recall reading a few of these books, one
right after the other, and each of them twisted and
distorted the facts willy-nilly to suit the subject at hand.

I especially liked the way in which the Lasker/Capablanca
dispute was handled. IMO, it was as clear as day that
the world champion was in the wrong, and yet a whole
slew of authors somehow managed to see things both
ways, depending on which man was preordained to
come out on top in the current paragraph or chapter.

Rather than brandish the name "Hannak" like some
formidable weapon, I should think a better move would
be to bury it deep in the mud, where it rightfully belongs.


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."

I should prefer to know the facts on this matter, not
hearsay anecdote. Is there any hard evidence that
GM Lasker did not prepare at all?

B: "Have you taken time out to rest?"
L: "No."

Ditto.


B: "At least you are taking along a chessboard in order to study
chess on the voyage?"
L: "No."

GM Capablanca's then-recent games were few, and
his preferences in the openings could easily be
committed to memory even by patzers like me. The
man liked the QGD as Black, for instance.


B: "Have you reviewed the openings you will play and studied the
games of Capablanca?"
L: "No."

I would say that this is de facto evidence of lying.
What chess player could resist the temptation of
replaying GM Capablanca's most recent games?
Perhaps if the man had been in the infantry, stuck
in some foxhole... okay.


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

Good gawd; is this the standard of what you
consider to be "evidence"? Mere anecdote?
Is there some hidden reason for believing GM
Lasker to be incapable of deceit in answering
such questions? I'm all ears.


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,

Uh-oh. This brings back memories (nightmares?)
of my high school English classes, where students
were forced (against their will, beyond any doubt) to
diagram sentences. Funny thing is, afterwards I
never, ever had an opportunity to make use of this
"valuable" skill. Heck, I was so good at it that the
teacher gave me her college textbook to look at,
but it was full of more, useless stuff.

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.

What I do know is this: Jose Capablanca was
cheated out of a shot at "Lasker's" title a long,
long time before this over-hyped 27 (or 28, by
some accounts) years were up. In essence,
what was tiring was the desperate clinging on to
the title by cowardly scumbags who were worthy
of the title only in terms of playing strength, but
little else. It is also tiring to watch this sort of
thing play itself out; the more so when the young
upstart would likely have lost anyway.


The public gets tired of the same man winning all
the time, they want to see a new face.

Then change the challenger:

Fischer/Petrosian 1-0

Fischer/Spassky 1-0

Fischer/Tal 1-0

Fischer/Botvinnik 1-0

Fischer/Keres 1-0

Fischer/Korthcnoi 1-0

Fischer/Taimanov 1-0

Fischer/Evans 1-0

Fischer/Parr 1-0

Fischer/Sloan 1-0

Fischer/Rob Mitchell 1-0

Fischer/Sanny 1-0

Okay, NOW I am getting tired of seeing this guy win!
(Bring on Rybka 5.0.)


Similar situations were
Steinitz-Lasker 1894, Botvinnik-Tal 1960, Karpov-Kasparov 1985. And
the public can be quite fickle; attending the 2003 Kasparov-Karpov

Um, two Russians whose names sound alike playing
in New York? This one is obvious. And IMO Chess Life
could have done a much better job of trying to make these
chess-athons look interesting to Americans.


exhibition match in New York, I noticed that most of the crowd who
expressed any favoritism were pro-Karpov, something unthinkable 20
years earlier.

Again, an irrelevant anecdote in lieu of substantive
evidence.


the chess world was pretty tired of him.
As IM Winston
Churchill so succinctly put it: "Chess history is bunk".

That was Henry Ford.

No. Mr. Ford was only an FM, despite defeating
NM Studebaker and WGM Deusenberg each, 6-0.


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."

Yeah, but my point wasn't about what anyone "wants".
It had more to do with the fact that history *is* bunk.

-- help bot