麻豆传媒

YORKTON - Even among the most devoted board game players you may not know who José Raúl Capablanca is.

But, if you are a chess player who has studied the game’s history even a little bit you will most certainly know of the Cuban-born Capablanca who was the third world chess champion from 1921 to 1927.

Lesser know though may be that he created a variant of chess not surprisingly known as Capablanca Chess. It incorporates two new pieces and is played on a 10×8 board.

The new pieces he named the archbishop, (combining the powers of a bishop and a knight), and the chancellor (combining the powers of a rook and a knight). The two combination pieces have become sort of a staple in the chess variant world – sometimes under alternate names – and in fact Capablanca’s design has itself been basically tweaked and renamed a few times too.

It’s a chess variant family tree that is rather lengthy and historic in nature so perhaps that a writer would finally write that story is not such a great surprise.

That is exactly what John Vehre has recently done with a two book set ‘Adventures in Capablanca Land’.

So I will preface this review immediately by stating you must be a huge chess fan interested in the game’s history, and in variants, before you are likely to want to run out and buy these books.

From the very specific topic alone it is rather obvious their creation was one of passion, and fans of the books best share that passion going in.

That said, in terms of chess history Vehre has created two books of definite significance that warrant a space on a chess fan’s book shelf.

When asked via email what was the idea which led to writing a book on this particular sub-group of variants, Vehre said his inspiration came from another book.

“The idea can trace its origins from Edward Lasker’s old book: Chess Secrets I Learned from the Masters,” he said. “In that book he mentioned playing games with Jose Raul Capablanca, where they tested out using the chancellor and archbishop pieces on different sized boards.

“As the well-known story goes, Capablanca was trying to find a solution to the impending draw death of chess. He hoped to achieve this by both adding complexity and the novelty two new pieces would bring to the game. This notion of draw death of course was premature in the 1920s and even more so in the 1970s when I read this book. Still the idea of having these two extra pieces nearly as powerful as the regular queen appealed to my teen-aged mind, which preferred attacking situations over positional grinds.

“When I did finally find places to play chess variant games 15 years later, I concentrated on those that used the chancellor and archbishop pieces. Consequently grand, gothic, embassy and Janus chess were my first encounters with competitive variant play.”

From playing the varied variations on Capablanca’s original idea, the idea of a book was sort of a natural progression for Vehre.

“After playing numerous games with these and other variants, the actual idea for the book occurred to me at the time of my retirement. By then I had accumulated enough material for a book,” he said.

“Also, I always wanted to write a chess book and over the years I did write chess columns and a few articles for chess variant magazines. However, prior to retirement, I seldom had the time to tackle a major project like this. Still, I thought chess variants were worthy of such analysis. Such analysis was generally lacking and with the exceptions of shogi, xiangqi and go, little analysis had been done, especially with chess variants based on western chess.

“Most chess variant books seem to concentrate on describing variants or presenting the author’s latest and greatest version of a replacement for classical chess. When example games were included, they tended to be limited to bare game scores. I wanted to make up for this omission and present a collection of games between stronger amateur players illustrating the strategies of these games.

“Others might disagree, but I always thought the best way of learning chess was through studying well annotated games. Ultimately, the choice of variants for this book ended up being those that I actually played. Originally, I had intended only using my own games, but ultimately expanded the scope to include the games of other strong practitioners. Having access to Brainking’s collections of games was certainly helpful here.”

The author said readers can expect a brief overview of these variants, followed by a detailed analysis of individual games.

“As my wife always observed, I like to chase after rabbits in my analysis and if you like a detailed treatment of a chess game, you will find it here,” offered Vehre.

“However, I also tried to make enough explanations in words that a reader is not totally bogged down with variations. When studying a chess game, you can often skip over long analysis if it is not your thing or just treat those diagrams followed by detailed analysis as an exercise. In those cases, you can cover up the moves and undertake your own analysis, after which you can compare your results with the author’s.”

Vehre went on to suggest the best part of the book are its illustrative games.

“I was pleased to be able to find a good number of competitive games between competent players,” he said. “This was challenging and even with Brainking, which has a good number of players, there seldom were more than 30 or 40 players contesting these variants at any given time. Also, players would come and go and even if stronger players were present, they might never meet each other as many players would experiment with variants, but would then return to good old chess after a year or two of play. Having good illustrative games is important and for my part, I always prefer studying games where there is a good fight with fluctuating fortunes. It is never fun to follow a blowout, and I think the good majority of the games presented in the book had a good fight.

“Admittedly, they seldom were perfect games but considering the complexity of many of these variants, it would be hard to play a flawless game, even under correspondence chess conditions.”

Ultimately, Vehre said he imagines chess will change over time, and the books provide an insight into one possible direction.

“In my heart of hearts, I hoped to show that even if classical chess drifted toward a draw death that there were alternatives and that chess would continue. It might not be clear what that successor may be, but ultimately some change in the classical form will happen within a generation or two,” he said. “Whether it will be one of the games in this book is of course debatable, but the existence of such games does point to the possibility and illustrates the near infinite possibilities that chess and its variants contain.

“I also wished to encourage other and hopefully even better players to try their hand at analyzing these or other games. I know the reward is not there for professional players, but there are many strong amateur players who could contribute to promoting chess variant play and analysis.

“Finally, I hoped fans of these, and similar games would obtain useful insights and learn from mine and others’ mistakes. Many of course would argue that chess is complicated enough, but if players want to tackle these more complex games seeing other experiences would certainly be helpful.”