To give Prusikin proper credit, I paraphrased his description of the merits of posting a knight on d6. In actuality, he specifically listed just about all of the benefits given by FreeRepublic in Reply #15.
Digging a bit deeper into the "Capablanca Formula", I pulled out my copy of
Techniques of Positional Play by Bronznik and Terekhin, which Prusikin cited as the source for ascribing the ...Nd6 idea to Capablanca. The two authors point to Reti-Capablanca, Moscow 1925 as the first appearance of ...Nd6 against the minority attack.
In the position below, Reti has just played 22.b4 and 23.a4, clearly intending a minority attack. Capablanca then replied 23...Nd6, and the knight's reinforcement of b5 caused Reti to switch to a central advance with 24.e4. The game was drawn on move 33.
Bronznik and Terekhin note that because the d-pawn is on d3 rather than d4 (the game originated from a Reti Opening), the efficacy of Capa's ...Nd6 maneuver against the minority attack in the QGD Exchange Variation wasn't realized for some time. The two authors trace some near misses from 1948 and 1950 where Capa's idea was almost implemented against the QGD Exchange. However, those instances are rather close in time to Euwe's
Judgement and Planning book that was cited by kylemeister in Reply #12. I also looked through Euwe and Kramer's
The Middle Game Volume 1 from about the same time, and posting a knight on d6 was explicitly given as one of the ways to counter the minority attack. Thus, the "Capablanca Formula" had become common knowledge by the 50s.
I then recalled that Imre König traced the historical evolution of the QGD minority attack in his 1952 book
Chess from Morphy to Botvinnik. He gives Alekhine-Capablanca, 14th Match Game 1927 as an example (presumably the first) of the ...Nd6 idea. The relevant position is
where Capablanca has just played 16...Nd6. Alekhine didn't attempt a minority attack (he tried for produce something on the kingside with17.Ng3), so perhaps the other authors didn't regard this game as the best example. König says, "The importance of this game lies in Capablanca's introduction of the knight maneuver to d6 which has since become an important defensive resource." Perhaps Capa remembered the ...Nd6 idea from his earlier game with Reti and tried it again a couple years later in a different setting. I'm not sure why Bronznik and Terekhin didn't point out this game in tracing the development of the ...Nd6 idea, unless it was because of the non-appearance of the minority attack. It seems a bit odd that they would jump ahead twenty years when they had an example of Capablanca himself playing "his" maneuver.
I'm afraid my earlier search failed to turn up this 14th Match Game since I was just looking for Informant codes D35-D36, which misses transpositions to the Exchange Variation that occur later. In this case, Alekhine didn't play cxd4 until move 11, and the game is classified as D64.
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QGD Exchange Variation (Read 1484 times)
