Adolf Anderssen

◇A mathematics master from Breslau

Adolf Anderssen was born in Breslau in 1818 and stayed bound to the city his whole life. He passed through its gymnasium and its university, studying mathematics and philosophy, and graduated in 1847 to become an instructor — and in time a Professor of Mathematics — at the Friedrichs-Gymnasium. In 1865 the University of Breslau awarded him an honorary doctorate. He never married. He shared a quiet household with his widowed mother and an unmarried sister, and lived what one historian called a stable, responsible, respectable middle-class life.

Chess was never Anderssen's job. He earned his living as a teacher, and the odd thing about his life is that this careful, dutiful provincial schoolmaster played the most daring attacking chess anyone had yet seen. Reuben Fine later noted the contrast between his brilliance at the board and his cautious, safety-first approach to everyday life.

◇The problem composer

Anderssen was a published problem composer before he won in London. His Aufgaben für Schachspieler nebst ihren Lösungen first appeared in Breslau in 1842. Joh. Urban Kern published a thoroughly revised second edition in 1852, containing sixty numbered problems with diagrams and solutions.

In the preface to the second edition, dated April 1852, Anderssen explained that problem composition had advanced so much in the intervening decade that simply republishing older work would be inadequate. Despite the collection's favorable reception, he had agreed to the new edition only after correcting defects in both form and content. He acknowledged that some of his earlier problems retained their value because they had prompted better work; some others, he thought, needed no indulgence (Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage, pp. III–IV).

Twelve years later Jean Dufresne opened the three-move section of his Anthologie der Schachaufgaben (Berlin, 1864) with eight of Anderssen's problems, and he printed twenty-two in all. In his introduction Dufresne ranked them among the best problems ever composed and wrote that their positions were unusually natural, always looking as if they had come from a real game. He placed Anderssen beside Conrad Bayer and the Englishman Healey as the leading modern composers: Healey was perhaps the deeper of the three, he thought, but the two Germans had the lighter and more pleasing invention (pp. VIII, XII).

◇London, 1851: the first crown

In 1851 the chess world gathered in London for the first international tournament ever held — a knockout staged alongside the Great Exhibition. The favourite was the Englishman Howard Staunton, the strongest player of the previous decade and the tournament's chief organiser. Anderssen swept the field. He put out Lionel Kieseritzky, József Szén, Staunton himself, and finally Marmaduke Wyvill, winning each match by a margin of at least two games, and finished with the first prize of roughly £335 — a small fortune.

The London victory nearly ended at the quarterfinal stage. Kasparov records in My Great Predecessors, Part I that Anderssen lost the first two games to József Szén before recovering to win 4–2. The first-round format had required only two wins; later rounds were extended to four.

The organisers had spoken, half in earnest, of contesting the baton of the World's Chess Champion. There was no official title yet — Wilhelm Steinitz would not claim the first one until 1886, thirty-five years later — but from that summer until Paul Morphy's brief comet in 1858, Anderssen was regarded as the strongest player alive.

◇The Immortal and the Evergreen

Two of the games Anderssen played were never official contests at all, yet they outlived every tournament he won. During a break in the London event, on 21 June 1851, he played a casual game against Kieseritzky and, to force checkmate, gave up a bishop, both rooks, and finally his queen, mating with the few minor pieces that remained. It became known as the Immortal Game, and it is still, more than a century and a half later, the most famous single game of chess ever played.

The following year, in Berlin, he played its companion against Jean Dufresne: two knight sacrifices, then a rook, and finally the queen, ending in a forced mate with nothing wasted. Wilhelm Steinitz named it the Evergreen. Together the two games made Anderssen the great attacking player of his time, one who was happy to give up material for a beautiful finish. Dufresne gave the loser's view of the game in the Anthologie. Anderssen's 19.Rad1, he wrote, prepared the sacrifice that followed, and his own mistake was 19...Qxf3. Even then he thought he might have held by answering 20.Rxe7+ with 20...Kd8, and he doubted whether White would still have won (p. XVI).

His style was the romantic style in its purest form — rapid development, open lines, gambits offered without flinching, and the king-hunt as the highest expression of the game. He even gave his name to an opening, the quiet flank move 1.a3, the Anderssen Opening, which he tried three times against Morphy; it never caught on, but it remains one of the few openings named for a player who used it almost as a joke.

◇Morphy and Steinitz: the tide turns

In the winter of 1858 a young American came to Paris. Paul Morphy beat Anderssen in their match by seven wins to two, with two draws, a decisive defeat taken graciously on both sides. Anderssen, no sulker, said plainly that Morphy was the better player, and when Morphy retired the following year Anderssen quietly took his place at the top again.

The second reckoning was closer and more historic. In 1866, in London, Anderssen met Wilhelm Steinitz across fourteen games with no draws between them, and lost by eight wins to six, Steinitz taking the final two. That match is generally seen as the moment Steinitz succeeded Anderssen as the world's leading active player — the old romantic giving way to the man who would make chess a science. There was no rancour. Steinitz revered him, and learned from him.

◇The late renaissance

After his defeat by Morphy, Anderssen returned to major tournament success. He dominated London 1862 — the first major round-robin — with twelve wins in thirteen games, two full points clear of Louis Paulsen. That victory preceded his 1866 match with Steinitz; his tournament successes would continue after the match defeat.

His best late result came at Baden-Baden in 1870, one of the strongest tournaments of the nineteenth century. There, past fifty, Anderssen finished first ahead of Steinitz, Joseph Blackburne, Gustav Neumann and Paulsen, beating the man who had taken his place at the top four years earlier. From 1862 to 1878 he won five major tournaments and kept competing, and players across Europe turned to him for advice and arbitration.

◇The man behind the board

Away from the board Anderssen was modest and generous, and people trusted him completely. He edited the Deutsche Schachzeitung for nearly twenty years and helped found the Neue Berliner Schachzeitung, and he did as much for the game as a writer and judge as he did as a player. Steinitz, who beat him and took his place, wrote of him warmly: Anderssen was honest and honorable to the core, and so obviously disinterested that his word alone was usually enough to settle a dispute.

Anderssen also wrote an essay of opening analysis for Dufresne's Anthologie, covering the Evans Gambit, the Ruy Lopez, the Kieseritzky Gambit and the Sicilian. Dufresne, who called him the greatest master in Germany or indeed in Europe, printed it after the book's game positions. In it Anderssen argued that the newer defense to the Ruy Lopez, 3...a6, was clearly worse than the older 3...Nf6, and he admitted that he had lost with it to a leading player of Breslau's academic chess circle. In the Sicilian he claimed credit for bringing into practice the move order in which Black develops the king's knight before the queen's knight. He also wrote that in that opening he felt more confident and at ease as the defender than as the attacker (pp. VI, 191–193, 201).

He kept his teaching post to the end, returning each season from his tournaments to the classroom in Breslau. In March 1879, not long after his last events, his heart gave out in the city where he had been born and had never really left. He was sixty years old, and he had spent a lifetime proving that a quiet man could be, on sixty-four squares, the boldest in the world.