The third Moscow international chess tournament in 1936 had an impressive field of participants, including two former world champions (Jose Raul Capablanca, Emanuel Lasker) and one future world champion (Mikhail Botvinnik). The tournament took place at the Hall of Columns in Moscow, Russia from May 14th to June 8th, 1936.
The solid mix of Western and Soviet competitors were to play a double round-robin, consisting of eighteen total games. Capablanca, nine years removed from being the world champion, was alone in first place at the halfway mark. A point and a half behind him were Botvinnik, Lasker, and Viacheslav Ragozin. The only player to keep within reasonable distance of the leader was Botvinnik, but he eventually finished a full point behind the tournament champion, Capablanca.
This tournament book was written by one of the participants, Gregory Levenfish and later translated to English by Jimmy Adams. The seventh round game between Capablanca and Botvinnik was an instant classic (link to Kevin Marchese's Rookhouse.com).
The phrase 'third Moscow international chess tournament' means that the event followed the Moscow 1925 and Moscow 1935 tournaments. Crosstables for the three tournaments, which were all seminal events in the development of Soviet chess, are available at WorldChessLinks.net.
I've already touched on the tournaments at least twice in
- Rise of the Soviet Chess Hegemony [2005: About.com], and
- Moscow 1925 [2007: This blog's Lasker's Moves that Matter -> Kasparov"s Predecessors I]
Other resources of special note are
- Capablanca on Moscow, 1925 [Edward Winter's Chesshistory.com],
- Shakhmatnaya goryachka (1925) ['Chess Fever', Imdb.com; clips available on the usual video sites],
- 'The Second International Chess Tournament, Moscow 1935' [anonymous review on Chesscafe.com of the tournament book 'Edited by Nikolai Krylenko and Ilya Rabinovich, Translated by Jimmy Adams and Sarah Hurst, Caissa Editions 1998'],
- Moscow, Russia - 1935 [Rookhouse.com; Java player for all games], and
- Moscow 1936 [Chessgames.com; links to all individual games on the same site]
All three events featured World Champions Lasker, Capablanca, and Botvinnik, although Botvinnik had only a minor role in 1925.
We had a good lecture at our club titled "Moscow 1925 and the Origins of the Soviet School of Chess" which may interest your readers. Around the time of that lecture, I was looking at games from Moscow and made several posts on the tournament, including "Torre Plays the Torre at Moscow 1925" and "Torre - Saemisch, Moscow 1925". Readers may also appreciate Winter's excellent discussion of the famous Capa - Bogo game from that tournament in his piece "Analytical Discord."
ReplyDeleteI am a big fan of this tournament and other tournaments of the 1920s, when the West could still boast of its champions!