The Playing Strength and Style of Alexander Alekhine
Statistical ranking systems differ sharply in their views of Alekhine. "Warriors of the Mind" rates him only the 18th strongest player of all time and comments that victories over players such as Bogoljubov and Euwe are not a strong basis for an "all time" ranking. But the website "Chessmetrics" ranks him between the fourth and eighth best of all time, depending on the lengths of the peak periods being compared, and concludes that at his absolute peak he was a little stronger than Emanuel Lasker and Capablanca, although a little weaker than Botvinnik. Jeff Sonas, the author of the website "Chessmetrics", rates Alekhine as the sixth highest peak strength, relative to other players of the same era, of all-time on the basis of comparable ratings. He also assesses Alekhine's victory at the tournament of San Remo in 1930 as the sixth best performance ever in tournaments. In his 1978 book The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present, Arpad Elo gave retrospective Elo ratings to players based on their performance over the best five-year span of their career. He concluded that Alekhine (2690) was the joint fifth strongest player of those surveyed (tied with Paul Morphy and Vasily Smyslov), behind Capablanca (2725), Botvinnik (2720), Emanuel Lasker (2720) and Mikhail Tal (2700).
Alekhine's peak period was in the early 1930s, when he won almost every tournament he played, sometimes by huge margins. Afterward, his play declined, and he never won a top-class tournament after 1934. After Alekhine regained his world title in 1937, there were several new contenders, all of whom would have been serious challengers.
Alekhine was one of the greatest attacking players and could apparently produce combinations at will. What set him apart from most other attacking players was his ability to see the potential for an attack and prepare for it in positions where others saw nothing. Rudolf Spielmann, a master tactician who produced many brilliancies, said, "I can see the combinations as well as Alekhine, but I cannot get to the same positions." Dr. Max Euwe said, "Alekhine is a poet who creates a work of art out of something that would hardly inspire another man to send home a picture post-card." An explanation offered by Réti was, "he beats his opponents by analysing simple and apparently harmless sequences of moves in order to see whether at some time or another at the end of it an original possibility, and therefore one difficult to see, might be hidden." John Nunn commented that "Alekhine had a special ability to provoke complications without taking excessive risks", and Edward Winter called him "the supreme genius of the complicated position." Some of Alekhine's combinations are so complex that even modern champions and contenders disagree in their analyses of them.
Nevertheless, Garry Kasparov said that Alekhine's attacking play was based on solid positional foundations, and Harry Golombek went further, saying that "Alekhine was the most versatile of all chess geniuses, being equally at home in every style of play and in all phases of the game." Reuben Fine, a serious contender for the world championship in the late 1930s, wrote in the 1950s that Alekhine's collection of best games was one of the three most beautiful that he knew, and Golombek was equally impressed.
Alekhine's games have a higher percentage of wins than those of any other World Champion, and his drawn games are on average among the longest of all champions'. His desire to win extended beyond formal chess competition. When Fine beat him in some casual games in 1933, Alekhine demanded a match for a small stake. And in table tennis, which Alekhine played enthusiastically but badly, he would often crush the ball when he lost.
Bobby Fischer, in a 1964 article, ranked Alekhine as one of the ten greatest players in history. Fischer, who was famous for the clarity of his play, wrote of Alekhine:
Alekhine has never been a hero of mine, and I've never cared for his style of play. There's nothing light or breezy about it; it worked for him, but it could scarcely work for anyone else. He played gigantic conceptions, full of outrageous and unprecedented ideas. ... [H]e had great imagination; he could see more deeply into a situation than any other player in chess history. ... It was in the most complicated positions that Alekhine found his grandest concepts.
Alekhine's style had a profound influence on Kasparov, who said: "Alexander Alekhine is the first luminary among the others who are still having the greatest influence on me. I like his universality, his approach to the game, his chess ideas. I am sure that the future belongs to Alekhine chess." In 2012, Levon Aronian said that he considers Alekhine the greatest chess player of all time.
