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Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine (31 October 1892–24 March 1946) was a naturalized French chess grandmaster and twice the world chess champion, most often remembered for his fierce and imaginative attacking style and for his contributions to chess opening theory, including his 1921 development of a hypermodern eponymous defense.
Born in Moscow, Russia, to a landowner father and a privy counsellor mother, Alekhine was taught chess by his mother and older siblings Alexei and Varvara, and he played his first organized tournament, a correspondence event sponsored by the Russian magazine Shakhmatnoe Obozrenie, in 1902. Having in 1907 finished the Moscow championship in equal eleventh, behind Alexei's equal fourth, Alekhine won the city championship in 1908 and placed fourth in a tournament in Düsseldorf, Germany, later that year, notably defeating German master Count Curt von Bardeleben. Alekhine won eight amateur tournaments across the five subsequent years and in 1913 began to play regularly on the international stage, contesting matches with German master Edward Lasker (played in Paris, France, and London, England), and Cuban Grandmaster and future world champion José Raúl Capablanca, to whom Alekhine lost in St. Petersburg but whom he would defeat in 1927 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to earn the world championship title for the first time.
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