<This is the, "Cambridge Springs Defense." It is named after one of the very few International Tournaments played in the U.S. prior to 1950. (Cambridge Springs, 1904.)

(The variation is so named because it was first introduced by Harry N. Pillsbury and played for the first time at that tournament.)

I also propose that this variation be referred to as the, "Pillsbury Variation" after its creator. A.J.G.>

Well, Pillsbury did not introduce this move. It was introduced by Emanuel Lasker in this game, in 1892, a full 12 years before Pillsbury played it:

You don't need to cheerlead for Alekhine; I remember who won the match. I am sure you are right that Capa did not expect to fall behind again after game 7. I was pointing out Capa's resiliency long into the match, at Games 27, 28, 29.

The game D Andreikin vs Kramnik, 2013 offers one three suggestions of how Capablanca might have been able to prevail with greater space against the bishop pair:

The move 15 Be4 offers one suggestion: exchange one of the bishops

The move 16 Rfd1 offers a second suggestion: gain a lead in development.

By an extension of this logic, one could conclude that any great master was not always, as you put it, a fighting tiger. Even Fischer took a short draw with White near the finish of one of his numerous US championship victories with the event in the bag. Shall we thus conclude that there was lack of fight in him? How about Korchnoi, who in 1972 played a team event at Moscow which featured several draws of fifteen moves or less? Was he another chicken?

When the eleventh game in the match at Buenos Aires between Capablanca and Alekhine for the world's chess championship was adjourned on Friday evening Capablanca remained in the hall for two hours studying the board.

He then decided make use his right to postpone the play for one day. The game will therefore resumed, tonight, so far it is considered one the most notable ever played.

What appeared at first to Capablanca triumph was turned into a fairly even game through Alekhine's masterly style. Capablanca opened with the Queen's Pawn, while Alekhine used the Cambridge Springs variation. Both later disregarded accepted forms and engaged in very unusual combinations. —Press Association Foreign Special.

<Shadout Mapes: 51...Rf8 is one of those legendary errors which plagues so many online databases.>

Not sure what you mean. Do you mean that 51...Rf8 is not the move actually played in the game?

51...Rf8 is in fact the actual move played, according to both Alekhine and to biographers Skinner and Verhoeven.

-Alexander Alekhine, "On the Road to the World Championship 1923-1927" (Pergamon 1984), p.170

The truth is that the match was played under the ""London Rules", which were a set of rules for World Championship matches, agreed on by Capa and most of his potential challengers (including Alekhine himself) during the London 1922 tournament. A lot of people were dissatisfied with the way Lasker had been able to go underground with the title for years, and wanted some kind of rules that would require a champion to face a challenger who ponied up a decent purse. There was supposed to be nothing punitive or difficult about them. Quite the reverse.

I prefer to call them 'Capa's Rules'; he drew them up, and the others agreed to them, as if they had a choice....

<In the end, Capa-Alekhine was the one and only match played under the London Rules, but they had been intended as a blueprint for all future matches.>

Yes, that is incorrect. There were no checkmates in this match. In this game Capablanca resigned one move from checkmate so the authors of that book supplied the missing one move instead of putting it in a footnote.

Irving Chernev wrote that Capablanca was never checkmated. There are, I believe, some game scores where Capa was checkmated but it is possible that the scores have been "filled in" in the same way.

I mean that an annotator has extended the score to include the mate, instead of writing "White resigned owing to a mate in 2, which would be achieved thus ...." etc.

The Best Annotated Chess Game on the Internet! >