At the start of each new year, as usual, I present a survey of chess a century ago.
With the benefit of hindsight, the chess highlight of 1911 was the first major tournament victory of the future world champion, twenty-two-year old José Raúl Capablanca. The year's most important master tournament was played at San Sebastian in Spain, in February and March. W. H. Cozens, in his review of 1911 for British Chess Magazine, November 1961, compared San Sebastian with a FIDE Candidates tournament of the period, a major event from which the world champion was the only obvious absentee. Some contemporaries complained that there were too many draws in the tournament.
