Chess
BY PHILIDOR
No. 41. A. MOSELY
1 . . K x 13; 2 R-R 5. 1 . R-Q Kt 7; 2 Q-R 3. Other W R moves WHITE (o men) are defeated by I . • •
R-R 7!; pinning W Q. Delightful miniature.
THE BEST OF THE LOT
'Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?' Fortunately we have no infallible oracle to answer corresponding questions in the chess world; if we had, it would cause just 01 much ill-feeling us the mirror did and—if con' cerned with living players—for very much the same reasons. In the absence of any reliably source of this kind I will try my own hand at an answer to the insoluble conundrum of who was the greatest player of all time. Safely sheltered (I hope) behind my anonymity I will first of all dismiss all living players; there are far more very strong players now than ever before, but none of them, to my mind—not even Botwinnik at his best—has quite the touch of genius of the greatest of the earlier champion`; Next I eliminate all players before Lasker; the only conceivable candidate is Paul MorphY, and, although it is possible that he was poten" tially the best of all, he played for such a short time and his opposition was relatively so weak, that he cannot have any claim to have established himself as actually the best.
This leaves Lasker, Capablanca and Alekhine; Of these three, I suspect that most people would put Alekhine or Capablanca first and will there' fore be surprised at my choice of Lasker, hat both statistics and personal impressions bear thi5, out. Taking the latter first, three distinguisheo players who played against all three of til, 'candidates' a number of times and to whorl r put the question on different occasions all put Lasker first. On the statistical side, the tourna' ment records of the three for the period 1914-39, a much more favourable period to Capabiatlet,i, and Alekhine than to the older Lasker (who won the world championship in 1895), show Lasker as clearly the most successful. Why was this', I think the explanation lies in character and psychology. Capablanca was perhaps the most flawless of the three in the sense that he was the hardest to beat, Alekhine the most irnaginativc and creative, but Lasker was the greatest fighter ; and an unparalleled winner of lost games: '1" knew just how to lace opponents with the tyP.e. of problems they most disliked. Combined sviin, this acute insight he had a stronger and better balanced character than the others, and it I these qualities that put him first. It is strange' incidentally, that Lasker himself always rou;,..tvr Wined that his brother Berthold was a be player than he; Sherlock Holmes and brother . Mycroft all over again—life copying fictiSS...-1 00° more.
Previous page
