New York 1915

With Europe's tournament chess shut down by the war, the strongest field in the hemisphere sat down in New York in the spring of 1915. Eight players met each other twice over fourteen rounds, and two of them left the rest behind entirely: José Raúl Capablanca and Frank Marshall both finished unbeaten, drew both of their own games, and beat everybody else. Capablanca took first with 13 out of 14 — and the man in third place finished five points behind Marshall.

◇A tournament in wartime

By 1915 the European tournament circuit had stopped, and New York was where the hemisphere's strongest players could still be found. Eight of them entered: Capablanca, Marshall, Abraham Kupchik, Oscar Chajes, Jacob Bernstein, Edward Lasker, Albert Hodges and Einar Michelsen. Charles Jaffe, reckoned the strongest American player apart from Marshall, was not among them.

The Lasker in this cross table is Edward Lasker, not the World Champion. Born in Germany, he had come to the United States in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of war, to work as an engineer in Chicago. The two men were in fact third cousins twice removed — a relationship Edward said he only learned of from Emanuel himself, shortly before the champion's death.

◇Capablanca and Marshall

Capablanca gave up only two half points in the entire tournament, both of them in short draws with Marshall, and won his other twelve games. Marshall finished +10 −0 =4 for 12 points — unbeaten himself, and still a clear point behind. They were the only two players in the field to finish with a plus score.

Kupchik and Chajes shared third and fourth on 7, five full points adrift of second place. Kupchik played much of the event under the hardest kind of strain: he was told, in the middle of his game against Hodges, that his father had died.

◇The masters on film

Two days before the first round, on 17 April, the players, committee men and other prominent followers of the game went to the studio of Pathé-Frères, where the opening round was reproduced for the cameras — footage afterwards shown in theatres across the country, with separate poses filmed for Capablanca and Marshall. It is among the earliest known film of chess masters at the board.

Capablanca's self-assurance became a story of its own. For their round-eight game on 29 April, Edward Lasker sat down to find the Cuban nowhere in sight; Capablanca arrived one minute before the clock would have forfeited him, met Lasker's prepared Riga Variation with a continuation of his own, and won.