The Immortal Game

In the summer of 1851, London held the first international chess tournament in history, and the strongest players of Europe crossed the Channel for it. Adolf Anderssen, a Breslau schoolmaster, would win it and go home the informal champion of the world. But the game the summer is remembered for was not played in the tournament at all. It was an offhand skirmish between rounds — probably at Simpson's Grand Divan on the Strand — against Lionel Kieseritzky, the resident master of the Café de la Régence in Paris.

Kieseritzky took the pawn Anderssen offered, then the bishop, then both rooks. Every capture was real; every capture cost him a tempo, and Anderssen spent the tempi assembling three minor pieces around the black king. By the seventeenth move White's queenside stood abandoned — a queen loose on the rank, gobbling rooks — while every remaining white piece bore on the small dark corner where the black king still stood on its starting square.

Then Anderssen gave away the queen as well. Kieseritzky's knight took her, because it had to, and the bishop slid to e7 and the game was over: mate, delivered by two knights and a bishop against an army that had barely moved. Black finished the game ahead a queen, two rooks and a bishop, and checkmated.

Kieseritzky wired the score to Paris the same week and printed it in his own journal — the first man to publish his own most famous defeat. An Austrian magazine called the game "immortal" four years later, and no one has seriously proposed a different adjective since. Engines have found defenses; teachers keep teaching it anyway, because nothing shows more plainly what development, initiative, and courage meant to the era that invented modern chess.