Rubinstein vs. Alekhine

     Alexander Alekhine's Best Games by Alekhine. This book was originally published in three volumes (My Best Games of Chess 1 908-1923, My Best Games of Chess 1924-1937 and also one by CHO'd Alexander, Alekhine's Best Games of Chess 1 1938-1945).  This edition is a reprint of the originals with additional notes by John Nunn. 
     I had all three volumes many years ago and they were great books, but all of them were destroyed in a house flood last year, so this book is the replacement. What I like about this book is all the games are in one volume and Nunn converted it to figurine algebraic notation. The best part is that he didn't tinker with Alekhine's annotations; if he had something to add, he did it in a footnote.

  

Trust me, you'll never get tired of playing over Alekhine's games. An international tournament at Semmering was held at the Grand Hotel Panhas in the Semmering Pass south of Vienna from March 7th to the 29th, 1926. The event was organized by Ossip Bernstein, who invited 18 players who were among the very best of the day. Spielmann, the great romantic, emerged as the winner over Alekhine in the last round. It was Spielmann's best tournament performance of his chess career.  Just look at the participants and you know the games will be great ones.

1. Spielmann 13.0 
2. Alekhine 12.5 
3. Vidmar 12.0 
4-5. Nimzowitsch 11.5 
4-5. Tartakower 5 
6-7. Rubinstein 10.0 
6-7. Tarrasch 
8. Réti 9.5 
9. Grünfeld 9.0 
10. Janowski 8.5 
11. Treybal 8.0 
12. Vajda 7.5 
13.Yates 7.0 
14-15. Gilg 6.0 
14-15. Kmoch 
16. Davidson 5.5 
17. Michel 4.5 
18. Rosselli del Turco 1.0 

You can just pick a game from the book at random and enjoy some remarkable chess. In this game Alekhine's 18...Nxf2 is incredible, but that was Alekhine's great strength...he uncovered moves that weren't obvious. Spielmann once wrote that he could see combinations as well as Alekhine, but he just couldn't get the positions Alekhine got.