Editing Alexander Alekhine (section)

===Accusations of "improving" games===
{{Chess diagram small
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 |Famous and much-analysed position from the "Five Queens" game
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[[Samuel Reshevsky]] wrote that Alekhine "allegedly made up games against fictitious opponents in which he came out the victor and had these games published in various chess magazines."<ref>Reshevsky 1976, p.78</ref> In a recent book [[Andy Soltis]] lists "Alekhine's 15 Improvements".<ref>Soltis 2002</ref> The most famous example is his game with [[Promotion (chess)|five]] [[Queen (chess)|queens]] in Moscow in 1915. In the actual game, Alekhine, playing as Black, beat Grigoriev in the Moscow 1915 tournament; but in one of his books he presented the "Five Queens" variation (starting with a move he rejected as Black in the original game) as an actual game won by the White player in Moscow in 1915. (He did not say in the book who was who in this version, nor that it was in the tournament.)<ref name="FiveQueens">The original game, without the five queens, was Grigoriev vs. Alekhine, Moscow 1915, which Alekhine annotated for the February 1916 issue of ''Shakhmatny Vyestnik''. But he presented the "Five Queens" version in a note to Tarrasch vs. Alekhine, St. Petersburg 1914, which is game 26 in Alekhine 1985. In the same book, Alekhine presented as a note to game 90 (Alekhine vs. Teichmann, Berlin 1921) a 15-move win against O. Tenner, which Tenner claimed was actually a variation that arose in their post-game analysis of their 23-move draw.</ref>

In the position shown in the diagram, which never arose in real play, Alekhine claimed that White wins by 24.Rh6, as after some complicated play Black is mated or goes into an [[Chess endgame|endgame]] a queen down. A later computer-assisted analysis concludes that White can force a win, but only by diverging from Alekhine's move sequence at move 20, while there are only three queens.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess/al5q.htm |title=Alekhine's 5 Queen game |author=Krabbé, T. |year=1985 |access-date=2008-05-23 |archive-date=2008-04-07 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080407014849/http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess/al5q.htm |url-status=live }}</ref>

Chess historian [[Edward Winter (chess historian)|Edward Winter]] investigated a game Alekhine allegedly won in fifteen moves via a queen [[sacrifice (chess)|sacrifice]] at [[Sabadell]] in 1945.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1013604 |title=Alekhine - Munoz, Sabadell 1945 |access-date=2008-05-24 |archive-date=2009-02-13 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090213075119/http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1013604 |url-status=live }}</ref> Some photos of the game in progress were discovered that showed the players during the game and their chessboard. Based on the position that the chess pieces had taken on the chessboard in this photo, the game could never have taken the course that was stated in the published version. This raised suspicions that the published version was made up. Even if the published version is a fake, however, there is no doubt that Alekhine did defeat his opponent in the actual game, and there is no evidence that Alekhine was the source of the famous fifteen-move win whose authenticity is doubted.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/sabadell.html |title=Mysteries at Sabadell, 1945 |author=Winter, E. |year=2005 |access-date=2008-05-23 |archive-date=2008-03-17 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080317071915/http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/sabadell.html |url-status=live }}</ref>