Book Review: Alexander Alekhine Complete Games Collection Volume 2: 1921-1925
Alekhine's play levels up, but the translation is a slight downgrade.
What can you learn from Alexander Alekhine? A lot — if you just let the man speak. For the myriad reasons why I think Alekhine’s analysis is instructive reading for the club player, you can refer to my review of Volume 1, and also of New York 1924. Everything I’ve said about these books on that particular topic applies here.
This book doesn’t cover the world championship match against Capablanca, but the time period right before it — Alekhine is still increasing in strength, and though third to Capablanca and Lasker, you can see his shadow rising over the landscape of tournament chess. In many of these games Alekhine is absolutely dominant. He hardly has any competition. Because of these mismatches, a lot of his wins make for very educational material.
Whereas in Volume 1, we saw Alekhine playing a lot of 1.e4 and experimenting with openings, here we see him increasingly relying upon the Queen’s Gambit complex with the White pieces. We also see Alekhine play his very own invention (1.e4 Nf6!?) multiple times throughout this collection. Unfortunately, these games are not very theoretically exciting for the most part, since the players with the White pieces weren’t enterprising enough to go for aggressive refutations and would rather rely on transposing to a normal 1.e4 opening instead.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of interesting ideas that Alekhine uncorks throughout the five years which are covered in this volume. And since Alekhine sought an advantage from the beginning, it leads to many trademark positions where he has managed to establish a dominant central presence through the judicious use of complications and tactics, and finally his opponent cracks under pressure to allow him the combinational coup de grace.
Not only does Alekhine continue to dominate much of the tournament scene (when Lasker and Capablanca are not present), but he participated in many simultaneous displays — often blindfolded — and this is where I discovered that many famous Alekhine tactics and combinations originate in these simul events, whether as occurring over the board or as part of his later published analysis of the games. While these casual games aren’t the most important of his career, they are still very entertaining to see, and if he was particularly proud of the game, his notes reflect this.
While Alekhine’s analysis is often pretty accurate, sometimes he goes a bit overboard, and this is where the editors wait until after their hero has had his say. This is one particularly humorous example.
In the above position, Game 218, Alekhine awards 17.e4-e5 a double-exclam, and proceeds to over-analyze the position and never finds the best resources for Black. The editors are patient to wait until he concludes his analysis, but then bluntly refute him. Afterwards, they conclude: “As we see, venturous move 17.e5 is entirely incorrect.” Alekhine’s analysis is not gospel; yet the editors are merciful to not point out all of his errors — just the big ones.
While Alekhine can be over-confident, there are also moments where we see him simply admit that he played poorly. For instance, in a rare simul loss, Game 224, Alekhine respects the play of his opponent, and doesn’t make an excuse for losing. This kind of posture toward his losses is instructive. But we also see moments where he seethes over a loss against Rubinstein and mocks those who praised the play of the winner. In other words, Alekhine was human. I do take note, however, that the later the games, the more he drips with a certain arrogance that befits one of the greatest players of his era.
There are some strategic elements I’ve noticed in Alekhine. For one, he makes a lot of references to weak color complexes in a way he hadn’t in the prior volume of games. To me this seems a clear sign of his skill and thought process maturing and becoming more holistic. But we also see how he continually under-estimates the hypermoderns of his era.
In a consultation game (Game 217) in which the Pirc Defense was employed by the opponents, he quips: “A game, in short, well-played by the allies, that was lost principally due to the unfortunate fianchetto, at that time in fashion thanks to the preachings of Reti.” In truth, Alekhine was in trouble for many moves of this game, and modern analysis by engines shows that Black’s play was, for a while, rather sound. Alekhine believed that their style of play in the opening and middlegame were incorrect — but in truth it wasn’t lost for Black until the endgame. This shows that Alekhine’s style was much more classical than neo-romantic — he still didn’t appreciate the idea of trading positional concessions for future winning chances through complications, and misidentified a player’s flaws as systemic to the hypermodern style of play instead.
I noticed this quirk in Alekhine most deeply in a game he played as Black against Nimzowitsch in a Reversed Sicilian (game 260). For most of the game, Alekhine believes he’s better, but only at the end does Nimzowistch make a series of game-ending errors that allow Alekhine to come back and win. In fact, Nimzo was clearly outplaying Alekhine until the latter half of the game when he made a rather unnatural move, forgoing the capture of an important pawn, allowing Alekhine to complicate the position and come out on top tactically:
Little hints of this prejudice occur throughout his notes. Alekhine was clearly a very powerful player and hypermoderns were still rather fresh and in the phase of brand new exploration, so I’m not critiquing him; I’m just interested and fascinated in how chess theory changes over time, and since Alekhine was such a great contributor to it, his ideas (whether good or bad, right or wrong) always have my attention as a reader.
My favorite game, probably in some part due to Alekhine’s ability to write analysis kind of like a murder mystery (where he is the suspect), is Game 276. Alekhine is blindfolded in this simultaneous game, which is impressive enough considering that he wins. But most impressive is the visualization of a combination that features a rook sacrifice and concludes in a subtly quiet bishop move that facilitates the promotion of a pawn to win the endgame. But in order to see this idea, Alekhine had to look 10 moves — 20 ply — forward to find it. I don’t have words to describe how incredible this is. So instead I’ll just give you another GIF:
Isn’t that grand? And there are many such instances of these talented displays waiting to be discovered in Vol 2.
Compared to Vol 1, this book has a downside:
While I find Vol 2 contains many amazing games and is therefore worth the effort to read and study, I do want to note that Vol 1’s translation was much superior, and Vol 2’s appears to have been rushed; there are some mistakes in notation or analysis where the translators clearly forgot to translate the original Russian into English. And in general, the English in the editor’s notes (not Alekhine’s, strangely enough) is translated far worse than in Volume 1. This doesn’t put me off the book at all, but it does represent a slight downgrade in production quality compared to Volume 1. Alekhine’s increasing skill and level of analysis, however, more than make up for this.
If you enjoyed Volume 1, you will certainly enjoy the follow-up. Now I have to wait, possibly forever, for Russian Chess House to release Volumes 3 and 4. But in the meantime, 300+ Alekhine games later, I’ll accept the delay as a helpful period to detox from delusions of grandeur that I could ever play as good as this legend.
This was a beautiful read.. thank you.