Capablanca's Best Games

by Harry Golombek

Jose Raul Capablanca is generally regarded as the player in chess history with the most natural talent. Champions since have eulogized his phenomenal play, with many of them attributing their development as players to studying his games. Botvinnik said of "You cannot play chess unless you have studied his games." "Capablanca invariably chose the right option, no matter how intricate the position." Capablanca was possibly the greatest player in the entire history of chess." High praise indeed, and this book is an indispensable guide for anyone who wishes to improve their future games by studying the past. Contains 100 of the finest games of Capa's career, with lively, detailed annotations.

Genres: Chess

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 1996

Reviews

[Randy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've decided to use Capablanca as my model for playing chess. He had this amazingly smooth and natural style. Only a few players since could be compared to Capablanca in the endgame. So, while this book is out of print and thus extraordinarily expensive, I found it and paid up. After going through most of the games, I have found Golombek's style and level of analysis to be just right for me. First, it was written in the pre-computer days, and it is clear that Golombek worshipped Capablanca. I am simply sick and tired of computer-based analysis and the zombies who can't look at a game without an engine. So in this book you have some light weight analysis and comments - which might be right or wrong, but the point is that Golombek thought that the position or game taught some kind of lesson, and it's up to the reader to decide if he's right or wrong.

Maybe someday I'll go back and check some of my analysis with an engine to see if there are any interesting ideas that were missed, but my objective is to absorb Capablanca's approach the game. Just playing through the game scores is not as fun as playing guess the move and see where you guessed right or not and why - maybe you played a better move? Then when you look at the notes in this and other books with different styles (like Kasparov's "My Great Predecessors") it seems like the games come alive with ideas.

If you are looking for deep, technical analysis, with long lines of computer generated analysis attempting to find the "truth" of the position, you won't find it here. What you will find is an interesting selection of games with human notes about one of best humans to ever play the game.

And looking at the endgames in this book is blowing my mind. Class players are just not good at the endgame. You could do so much worse than to see Capablanca pounce when the time was right or just outplay an opponents in what looks like a completely even endgame, conjuring a win out of nothing.