The Evergreen Game

A year after the Immortal Game, Adolf Anderssen sat down in Berlin for a casual game with Jean Dufresne — his own student, a capable master and a prolific chess writer. It was the Evans Gambit, the signature opening of the age: White gives a wing pawn at move four to seize the center and aim both bishops at the black king.

Dufresne defended actively, and by move eighteen had real threats of his own — his queen and rook bearing down the g-file at the white king. What followed is the most analyzed pair of moves of the nineteenth century. Anderssen played 19.Rad1, a rook to a quiet file, seemingly oblivious to the storm. Generations of annotators, Lasker and Neishtadt among them, have disputed whether it was the strongest move or merely the most beautiful; what is not disputed is what it prepared.

Two moves later the white queen landed on d7, where two black pieces could take her. The king had to. And the bishop check that followed was a double check — rook and bishop at once — the one kind of check no interposition and no capture can answer. The king walked, the second bishop came down, and Dufresne was mated holding an extra queen and rook.

Steinitz, the first World Champion and no sentimentalist about the Romantic school he had dismantled, called the game the evergreen in Anderssen's laurel wreath. The name stuck because it is accurate: a century and a half of engines and revisionists have pruned at the analysis, and the game is still green.