Alekhine's Five Queens Game — Moscow 1915

Moscow in Wartime, and a Rising Star

By the autumn of 1915 Alexander Alekhine was already one of the strongest players in the world. He had finished third at the great St Petersburg tournament of 1914, behind only Emanuel Lasker and José Raúl Capablanca, and at the outbreak of war he had been interned in Germany at the Mannheim tournament before making his way back to Russia. Back in Moscow, he played in the Moscow Chess Club championship, and it was there that he faced Nikolai Grigoriev, a young master who would later become the most celebrated composer of pawn endgame studies the game has known. The pairing is one of the small jokes of chess history: the future high priest of pawn promotion theory, on the wrong end of the most famous promotion spree ever printed. Alekhine won the game, of that there is no doubt. What happened on the way to the win is where the story gets complicated.

The MacCutcheon Powder Keg

The game opened as a MacCutcheon French: 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Bg5 Bb4, a line in which both sides accept structural chaos in exchange for activity. After 5.e5 h6 6.exf6 hxg5 7.fxg7 Rg8 the position was already unhinged: White had a pawn lodged on g7, two squares from promotion, while Black's pieces eyed the open h-file. What followed was a mutual pawn race of a kind almost never seen in master chess. White's h-pawn charged up the board, capturing and advancing, while Black's c-pawn swallowed material on its way through d4, c3 and b2, arriving next to White's queenside corner. Within twenty moves both armies had runners on the brink of promotion at opposite ends of the board. Students of chess tactics still use the game to illustrate the raw arithmetic of pawn races: when both sides promote, what matters is not who queens first but who gives check first.

Five Queens on One Board

In the finish Alekhine published, the race detonated completely. White's h-pawn captured on g8 and promoted, Black's queen had already devoured the rook on b1, and the famous sequence began. White's g7 pawn promoted to a second new queen, Black pushed his own passed pawn through to b1 for a second queen of his own, and for a few extraordinary moves the board held five queens: White's original lady plus two promoted sisters against Black's pair. Three queens delivered checks in rotation as Black's king was hunted across the queenside. The position works because of a brutal tactical truth: extra queens mean nothing if your king is the one in the open. Alekhine's three queens coordinated like a firing squad, and in the published line Black's resistance collapsed under a mating attack. It is among the most arresting diagrams in any anthology of famous chess games, a position that looks like a misprint and is nonetheless reachable by perfectly legal moves.

The Authenticity Problem

Here honesty is required, and the historians have done the work. When Leonard Skinner and Robert Verhoeven compiled their exhaustive record of Alekhine's games, they established that the game as actually played ended earlier, and that the five-queen extravaganza arose in analysis after the game rather than over the board. Alekhine, annotating his own games for My Best Games of Chess 1908-1923, presented the analytical continuation as if it had been played. He had form: several of his published brilliancies were quietly improved between the board and the printing press. None of this makes the position less remarkable as chess. It does mean the five queens belong to the analysis room, a fact any honest account must state plainly. Edward Winter and other chess historians have documented the discrepancy in detail, and the episode has become a standard case study in why primary sources matter more than memoirs, even the memoirs of famous chess players.

Alekhine After Moscow

For Alekhine the game was one bright fragment in a career that kept ascending. He survived revolution and emigration, took French citizenship, and in 1927 stunned the chess world by defeating the supposedly invincible Capablanca in Buenos Aires to win the world title, a match that remains one of the longest and hardest fought in the history of the World Chess Championships. He held the crown, with one two-year interruption against Max Euwe, until his death in 1946, the only world champion to die holding the title. Grigoriev found a different immortality: his pawn studies remain the bedrock of chess endgames teaching a century on. The five queens game linked the two men forever, the attacker who imagined the position and the endgame scientist who, fittingly, understood better than anyone alive what a passed pawn is truly worth.

Why the Five Queens Endure

Disputed or not, the position endures because it dramatises a rule every beginner learns and few ever see taken to its limit: a pawn that touches the far rank becomes anything it likes, and there is no ceiling on how many queens one side may own. The game is quoted in textbooks on promotion, on pawn races, and on the deeper point of chess strategy that material is only a means to the king. It also endures as a cautionary tale about sources, repeated for decades before scholars checked the record. Played a generation after Howard Staunton gave his name to the standard pieces, the five queens stand, in the mind's eye at least, on Staunton pattern squares: the one detail of the story nobody disputes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Did five queens really appear on the board in Alekhine vs Grigoriev?

Almost certainly not in the game as actually played. Alekhine published the game in My Best Games of Chess 1908-1923 with a spectacular finish in which five queens stood on the board at once, and for decades it was repeated as fact. Later researchers, most thoroughly Leonard Skinner and Robert Verhoeven in their definitive collection of Alekhine's games, established that the game itself concluded earlier and that the five-queen sequence arose in post-game analysis. Alekhine, a brilliant annotator with a documented habit of polishing his published games, presented the analytical line as though it had occurred over the board. The position is legitimate chess, reachable by legal moves from a real game, but the famous finish belongs to the analysis room rather than the tournament hall.

Q: How is it possible to get five queens on the board at the same time?

Through pawn promotion. Each side starts with one queen, and any pawn that reaches the far rank may become a new one, so multiple queens are entirely legal. In the Alekhine vs Grigoriev line, the wild MacCutcheon French opening sent pawns racing up both flanks: White's kingside pawns captured their way toward g8 while Black's queenside pawns ran toward b1. White ended up with three queens, the original plus two promotions, and Black with two, the original plus one promotion, making five in total. In practical play even one extra queen usually ends a game quickly, which is why positions with five are vanishingly rare outside composed studies and a handful of famous game fragments.

Q: Who was Grigoriev, Alekhine's opponent in this game?

Nikolai Dmitrievich Grigoriev (1895-1938) was a strong Moscow master, but his lasting fame rests on something else entirely: he became the greatest composer of pawn endgame studies in chess history. His analyses of king and pawn endings remain foundational a century later, and serious students of chess endgames still work through Grigoriev positions today. There is a pleasing irony in his role here, since the man who would devote his life to the precise science of pawn promotion was on the losing side of the most famous promotion spree in chess literature. He also served as an arbiter and organiser in early Soviet chess, and gave the radio commentary for the famous 1925 Moscow international tournament.

Q: What pieces would Alekhine and Grigoriev have played with in 1915?

Staunton pattern pieces. By 1915 the design that Jaques of London created in 1849, registered by Nathaniel Cook, who collaborated with Jaques on the project, and endorsed by Howard Staunton, had been the universal standard for serious chess for two generations. Russian clubs, including the Moscow Chess Club where Alekhine and Grigoriev played, used Staunton pattern sets as a matter of course. The design's clarity matters in a position like this one: with five queens on the board, instantly distinguishing each piece is not a luxury. Multiple-queen situations are also why good sets ship with spare queens or why players borrow one from a second set, a practical detail the Staunton standard made simple.