The immortal loser

There is no sensation quite like losing at chess, especially with a draw in sight and failing to escape. That’s what happened to me recently on an otherwise sunlit afternoon - and I thought on Lionel Kieseritzky. Born in Tartu in 1806 this giant of 19th Century chess suffered a spectacular defeat in a casual game in London, ahead of a world tournament that he was tipped to win.

Known as the Immortal Game, this contest of wills at Simpson’s Divan Tavern on 21 June 1851 is remembered more today for the winner sacrificing two rooks and a queen on the way to checkmate on move 23, than for Kieseritzky’s helping make this one of the most famous chess games of all time.

Earning a living as a chess player was all but impossible in Kieseritzky’s day but he managed it. He quit a safe position as a maths teacher in 1839, and moved to France where he taught chess for 5 francs an hour, and challenged allcomers to 5 francs a game at his favourite café de la Régence in Paris. His speciality was to offer opponents an advantage by starting with one fewer piece on the board, and still defeat them.

Ten years later Kieseritzky founded his own chess magazine, which he titled La Régence. By 1851 he was among Europe’s best-known chess players, earning him an invitation to the London tournament. This was the first of its type: 16 players, from St Petersburg, Budapest and Berlin, besides Paris and London.   

In The Immortal Game: A History of Chess (2006), David Shenk documents in captivating detail Adolf Anderssen’s triumph over the Estonian – a Russian émigré he would have been called at that time.

“This was supposed to be a forgettable practice game, a throw away,” Shenk writes. “No one, least of all the two players, had any idea they were about to produce one of chess’s all-time gems, a game some would consider the most remarkable ever played.”

The Immortal Game, after move 18

Early on Kieseritzky finds his black queen on the run until taking white’s rook at the bottom left corner of the board. So decoyed, Anderssen shuts the queen out of play, and two advanced knights and a bishop deliver the coup de grâce.

The indignity is made worse on the discovery that at move 20, black could have moved up his queen one square diagonally, and likely saved the game. This is made clear in The Mammoth Book of the World’s Greatest Chess Games (2010). I have replayed this position many times, and by following a precise sequence of moves, the steam goes out of white’s attack, and the end game is in black’s favour.

Anderssen went on to defeat Kieseritzky twice more on his way to winning in London, and played at the top of world chess until his death in 1879, a popular figure whose obituary in a German chess newspaper ran to 19 pages.

Kieseritzky met with a very different fate. Shortly after the Immortal Game, he published it in La Régence with his own annotations, concluding, “This game was conducted by M. Anderssen with remarkable talent.”

Shenk writes, “Broadcasting his own brutal loss was a testament to Kieseritzky’s humility, his respect for Anderssen, and his devotion to the game.” Kieseritzky returned to Paris, folded his magazine amid financial difficulties, and died in 1853 in a Paris mental hospital, unrecognised and destitute.

Even though I will never play chess at the level of Lionel Kieseritzky, or of my grandfather, my personal motto is “never give up”. The match score against me stands at 2½ : ½, and the winner is the first to earn 21 points. There is a long way to go, and I play white next.