Predecessors XI: Capablanca-Bogoljubow 1922

Like many of Ray Keene's columns, this piece has been written well in advance (albeit it's not been copied off anywhere or anybody else). Today I should be flying back home from my holidays, which in my case meant coming back to the UK and among other things playing in a tournament in London.

So let's have a glance at a game from another London tournament, one played in 1922. Specifically, the game Capablanca-Bogoljubow and the notes provided to that game in Ray's Spectator column in the issue for 15/22 December 2012.

You'll not be amazed to learn that Ray's notes were plagiarised wholesale from the first part of My Great Predecessors, where the game appears on pages 296 to 299.

1. White's move fifteen.

My Great Predecessors:

Spectator:

2. Black's move twenty-one.

My Great Predecessors:

Spectator:

3. Black's move twenty-four.

My Great Predecessors:

Spectator:

You'll have seen that Ray's entire note is taken from the passage attributed to Capablanca. Attributed, that is, in My Great Predecessors, but not by Ray, who passes off the phrase as his own.

It's another double plagiarism. Ray plagiarises Capablanca as well as my Great Predecessors.

4. White's move twenty-seven.

My Great Predecessors:

Spectator:

Consistent is the word.

5. White's move twenty-nine.

My Great Predecessors:

Spectator:

6. Black's move thirty-two.

My Great Predecessors:

Spectator:

This time, Ray omits the Capablanca passage: he does, however, purloin practically all the rest.

7. Black's move thirty-six.

My Great Predecessors:

Spectator:

For the first time, Ray employs a small sliver of vocabulary that he doesn't actually take from the original. I detect "after", "has" and "much better".

Better, perhaps. But not much.

8. White's move forty-one.

My Great Predecessors:

Spectator:

Ray, perhaps under the pressure of an absence of space, seems to have been forced to write his very own note this time. Mirabile dictu.

9. Black's move forty-four.

My Great Predecessors:

Spectator:

We close, however, with a wonderful piece of portmanteau copying, in which, although the vocabulary is apparently his, Ray gives a variation which he takes successively from Capablanca (44...Nb1), Tartakower (45 Rc4 to 48 d6) and Kasparov (the rest).

All of these are mentioned in the text which he is plagiarising. None of them are mentioned in his own.

If you can call it his own.

[Thanks to Pablo Byrne]

[Ray Keene plagiarism index]

[Ray Keene index]