Comic Error

There are a few errors on the ChessBase DVD that I mentioned in "Building a Lesson", Master Class 4: Jose Raul Capablanca. The one I found this morning is comic in the light of Capablanca's discursive comment at that point of the game. This position arose in the fifth match game between Frank Marshall and Jose R. Capablanca, 1909.

Black to move

Capablanca annotated this game in My Chess Career (1920). Capablanca played 26...Rxd4, and in his annotations indicated that he could have saved himself a lot of trouble by playing 26...Qf6. ChessBase omits this annotation, but after the subsequent 27.Qb8+ offers 27.Qc3 as an improvement. In fact, after 27.Qc3, Black checkmates in two moves.

In descriptive notation, both Capablanca's improvement and ChessBase's blunder are written Q-B3.

Capablanca comment on his own inaccuracy is instructive regarding ChessBase's error, and my own presumptions to comment on these games.

Not the best, Q-B3 was the right move. Incidentally it would have saved me a great deal of trouble which I had to win the game. Here I will call attention to the poor notes sometimes written by analysts. Games are often annotated by unknown players who have not sufficient knowledge of the game. As a matter of fact, the games of the great masters, at least, can only be properly annotated by very few players. Of course even the best are not exempt from mistakes, but while they make them few and far between the others do so continuously. (31)

I found another, slightly less severe, error earlier in the game as well. In that case a move was omitted from the sequence of exchanges, but this omission leads to an entirely different result--a Marshall win. Capablanca's annotation on his 26th move continued into a second paragraph.

I was highly praised by many because of the excellence of my play in this position, while in reality I could have done better. They simply did not see that here Q-B3 was better than the text move. (31)

White's 27.Q-B3 certainly would have been a lot better for Black. Marshall could have resigned at once.