New York 1931

◇The champion returns

By 1931 Capablanca had lost his crown to Alekhine and could no longer command the world stage, yet he remained one of the strongest players alive. New York gave him a mostly American field — organised by the Manhattan Chess Club and played at the Hotel Alamac during the depths of the Great Depression — with the Cuban as the lone international great among twelve players contesting a single round-robin of 66 games.

The tournament caught American chess just before a golden age. The newcomers included Arthur Dake, a merchant seaman with great natural talent; Alexander Kevitz, who took third here and gave his name to several opening lines; and Herman Steiner, who later built up high-level chess on the West Coast.

◇Ten out of eleven

Capablanca ran away with it, scoring 10 out of 11 — nine wins and two draws, undefeated — a point and a half ahead of the field. He dropped half-points only to Steiner and, in the final round, to Kashdan, whose own undefeated run of six wins and five draws earned second place and confirmed the nickname admirers had given him: 'the little Capablanca.' Kevitz finished third on 7.

Not every game was a jewel. By his own late-career standard Capablanca was sometimes fortunate, surviving difficult positions against Dake and Kevitz and even blundering a piece against Steiner before escaping with a draw — but the result was the kind of serene, class-apart procession that had defined his prime.

◇Chandler's chessboard

One of the tournament's games left a mark on literature rather than theory. Capablanca's win over Israel Albert Horowitz has been suggested as the game a character replays in Raymond Chandler's detective novel The High Window, in a passage that captures the eerie precision of the Cuban's style better than any technical note could.