Love is all you need?

Love love me do, you know that I love you.

<Patzer2> probably nails it down.

<Agent Bouncy> Your comment is intriguing because I've been reading some negative things about Alekhine. Well, one does not have to look hard for the well-known controversies: the sauce, dodging opponents, his (cough) "editing" (cough) of some of his games, associating or sympathizing with Nazis... am I missing anything?

Beyond that, I recently read a quote from Fischer--something about Alekhine not being one of his favorites--and I *think* Kasparov said something similar.

1) dodging opponents-no champion willingly defends his title without substantial financial reward-euwe and bogolyubov cd both raise the funds for world championship matches-it seems,however, that capa could not. i believe that there was an absence of enthusiasm amongst potential backers for another protracted match along 1927 lines-with its high percentage of draws-furthermore-on reading the published correspondence the impression i gain is that alekhine was being fairly straightforward and it was capa who was ducking and weaving. in tournaments alekhine certainly did not sidestep encounters with leading rivals and scored heavily against , for example, nimzowitsch, keres, flohr, and some notable victories against reshevsky and fine.

2) concocting games-the games in question are undoubtedly very brilliant and may have been the result of analysis rather than competition-i believe that this is not clear -but who knows-they may have been off hand games --in any case the treasure house of chess is all the richer for these wild combinational constructions whether invented by alekhines fertile brain or played in a tournament-he certainly didnt fabricate results-in my opinion by analogy you might as well accuse problem composers of concocting their positions.

3) nazi associations-as far as i can tell alekhine was apolitical and merely wanted the opportunity to play chess-this apolitical nature went as far as being excessively naive in the case of his notorious analysis of aryan and jewish chess. he may have written this, and he may also have come under intolerable pressure from the nazis to write it, or it may have been based on beliefs he really held. the truth is hard to establish.as far as playing in nazi tournaments is concerned, many other great masters have played in events organised by regimes just as repulsive as that of nazi germany-stalins russia springs to mind as an obvious example!

4)alcohol-i knew dr euwe ( and played him twice) and discussed alekhine with him-he said that alekhine was not drunk during the 1935 match, and , a fortiori, certainly not in 1937.

I wouldn’t expect and answer anytime soon, Raymond has a notoriously selective memory (not only to do with what you have pointed out, which has little consequence for him – but with things to do with money and copyrighted chess literature which he has republished under his own name). When people mention such things he will tend to claim ignorance or just completely ignore it...

Alekhine scored +21=2-1.