btw., There's only one other game involving Capablanca and Kaufmann in "The Unknown Capablanca": Hugo Fähndrich / Arthur Kaufmann - Capablanca / Tartakower, Vienna 1911.10.18 (Black wins in 45 moves, it's game Nr. 77).

In a written tribute to Maróczy (http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/...), Capablanca mentions of a match between Maróczy and the then-Hungarian-champion Géza Nagy, in which Maróczy totally destroyed Nagy.

Wikipedia tells me the match ended +5-0=3, and occurred in 1927/8.

Yet I can't find any games of that match.
I only found one (1) game between them, from ChessBase's Database, dated 1924, being a 39-move draw.

one major difference is that rubinstein did a lot of work on opening systems, while capa just aimed for a playable middlegame.

rubinstein was almost singlehandedly responsible for a lot of major opening ideas - the meran system in the semi-slav, queenside castling for white in the QGD, a lot of ideas for black in the spanish, he basically put the four knights opening out of business, 4.e3 and 5.Ne2 in the nimzo-indian, the g3,Bg2 system against the tarrasch defense, etc.

Janowski vs Capablanca, 1916

after which white can gain a serious advantage with correct play. fortunately for capa, janowski failed to take advantage of this, and capa went on to win a classic game.

i don't want to suggest that rubinstein never made a mistake in the opening, but i don't think rubinstein would have played 4...Bf5 without serious analysis, even this early in the game, and rubinstein certainly would have found the refutation, which is fairly simple, even for a patzer like me.

i can imagine capa thinking to himself "i'm developing my queen's bishop before playing e6, how can this possibly be bad, why waste time analyzing every possible reply?" and then playing the move instantly.

there are also countless examples of capa playing the steinitz defense against the ruy lopez, accepting a horribly cramped position, and then winning the game after outplaying the opponent in the middle game. modern GM's don't even consider accepting such a cramp, and the steinitz defense is a rare bird these days.

Unlike Alekhine and Rubinstein who prepared their openings, Capablanca was a dead lazy chess player who apparently just looked around to see what his fellow masters were playing and followed what seemed to him openings that adequately got him into a middlegame that was not obviously lost. He was not the guy to spring up novelties but more often than not the 'victim' of new openings.

But when the game got into the middlegame, Capablanca was and is probably the strongest chess player in history. At his prime, he played his middlegames almost like a computer, and his endgames probably better than a computer. Just as unsound tactics don't often work against a computer, they never worked against Capablanca either, and he made a career out of destroying unsound tactics. I think he was the only chessplayer who could actually destroy opening novelties as well by strong OTB play, if the novelty did not result into a completely won position.

Aside from his game with Janowski, two other famous Capablanca games were he got surprised in the opening were his games against Mieses and Marshall.

Mieses vs Capablanca, 1913

Capablanca vs Marshall, 1918

Marshall would probably have creamed anybody but Capa that he surprised with the Marshall attack, but Capa was practically playing like a computer. The way Capa turned the table against a Mieses who had won the exchange against him was also computer-like.

No other chess player in history probably consistently played his middlegames and endgames with so few errors as Capablanca, even in his blitz and rapid games. Since blitz and rapid games usually have the effect of making opening prep useless and force players to play virtually by their innate chess abilities, Capa was in his element in these shorter time controls.

If he was far ahead of most other players in classical games, the gap between Capa and the rest of the world became a veritable Mt Everest in blitz and rapids. Capa seemed to have been the only chessplayer who won all blitz and rapid competitions he played in all the time all his life; and I do not even know if he has ever lost a blitz game. At the beginning of his international career, he was demolishing Lasker and all the other top players easily, and at the end of his career, he was eating up Reuben Fine and the rest of the top American players, in blitz and rapids.

There were no large cash prizes for good blitz and rapid players during Capa's era, and so if he were living today, Capa would certainly be one happy person given all the blitz and rapid tournaments today that award large amounts of prize money. The lazy Capablanca would not even have to study openings for these tournaments because most opening prep become useless in blitz and rapids.

After seeing a young Capablanca devour all opposition in blitz and rapid games, I think it was Emanuel Lasker (whose style also was characterized by minimal errors) who remarked

Here's one game where Capa did play a prepared opening novelty at move 13 (Qf3), and completely demolished Levenfish, a strong GM who later drew Botvinnik in a match.

Capablanca vs Levenfish, 1935

Unfortunately, this was more of an exception for Capa. This is in marked contrast to say Kasparov, whose winning games are typically characterized by an opening novelty, attack, mate. Yet when Capa deployed an opening novelty himself, what do we have in the game above but opening novelty, attack, mate. It could well have been Kasparov playing white here.

Euwe vs Capablanca, 1931

Euwe vs Capablanca, 1931

Yeah. It was during his 1931 match with soon-to-be world champion Euwe. Euwe beat Alekhine 4 years later in a WC Match.

To continue:

Capablanca was capable of winning against opening novelties and unsound attacks even from the world's strongest players like Alekhine.

Alekhine vs Capablanca, 1914

Here Alekhine trots out his home-cooked 8. Nf5, after which Capa just plays his usual incredibly strong computer-like middlegame and proceeds to cook Alekhine's position.

Alekhine vs Capablanca, 1927

Here, Alekhine springs an entirely new treatment of the QID, by proceeding to pawn storm Capablanca. Capa in turned plays like a chess machine, getting in between the weaknesses left by AAA's advancing pawns, and totally crushing AAA's attack.

Apparently it was Capa's own strong middlegame play that fried AAA's attack, for Capa himself chose to play the same opening line as White against Marshall, deviating from AAA's previous home-cooking at move 10.

Capablanca vs Marshall, 1929

Capa treated this opening line differently from AAA. Instead of pawn storming Marshall, he opted to play for central control, won a pawn, and then squeezed Marshall to death in an impressive display of endgame skill, a model of how to transform a pawn advantage into a win.

Capablanca was certainly more than a match for Alekhine and Marshall, two of history's best chess tacticians, in the very field of tactics. IMO these latter two often got into tactical middlegame situations because of opening preps that got them into such tactical situations, but this required some homework which the lazy Capablanca would rather skip. My sense of things is that if Capablanca had prepared his openings as diligently as Alekhine, he would have been known as an untamable tactical chess monster with a hundred thousand eyes instead of a coldly calculating chess machine.

My uncle is a typical strong amateur chessplayer who may actually represent what most of the chess world is like. He was taught chess as a child. He was also a Justice of the Court of Appeals of the Philippines and a magna cum laude of the Law School of a Philippine University originally founded and run by Americans; and he has an incredible photographic memory that enables him to memorize piles of written laws verbatim. He naturally has memories of the late 30s and early 40s just before 1941 (when the Philippines was still an American colony, and we were getting news directly from the USA where Capablanca lived) when Alekhine was still the World Champion, and Capablanca was all the time trying to get a re-match. So I suspect that his views were the views of most of the Chessworld in the 1930s and 40s.

For myself, I naturally incline toward his views in the Capablanca vs Alekhine WC rematch issue, but then again I'm probably biased.

I will have to ask him. However, he probably does not know since as a child, his impressions would have been very shallow, just that AAA was the World Champion of his favorite game, and why the heck was AAA not giving Capa (his favorite player as a child just learning chess and looking for a chess idol) a rematch. I get the impression from talking to him that a large part of the chessworld was under that impression also, in the late 1930s and 40s.

(If you have chess-playing relatives who were born in the 1930s, you could also talk to them about their memories of this era.)