Great Players: Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais

 

de La Bourdonnais

After covering Alexander McDonnell in my previous post, it seemed only fitting to follow up with a post on his great rival, Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais (1795-1840). La Bourdonnais was born on the island of Réunion (where his grandfather had been governor), giving him the rare distinction among top players of having been born south of the equator.

He learned the game suprisingly late by modern standards, at the age of 19, but was evidently a fast learner: within seven years he would be considered the best player in the world, after becoming able to defeat his coach, Alexandre Deschapelles.

The best known, and best preserved, of his games are those of the matches with McDonnell in 1834; his winning the first, third, fourth and fifth matches, with an overall record of 45 wins, 13 draws and 27 losses, bolstered his claim to being the world's best player, and he would remain considered so until his death in 1840.

In many ways, La Bourdonnais was a great contrast to his rival, both in speed of play (La Bourdonnais was by far the faster of the two) and in personality (he was much more outgoing). There were also plenty of contrasts in their personal circumstances, too: McDonnell was wealthy throughout his life, while La Bourdonnais died in extreme poverty.

But despite all that, the two of them were fairly similar as chess players; both more comfortable in attack than defence, and both rather stronger tactically than they were positionally, like so many players from the early 19th century.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

West is Best at the 4NCL, Rounds 1-2, 22-23 October 2022

 The 4NCL , Britain's only professional chess league, has, like many chess events, been disrupted by the ongoing pandemic. The 2019-20 season was aborted six rounds in; there was no 2020-21 season, and the 2021-22 season was an experimental format for that season only: a Swiss system (chosen so that if it needed to terminate early, the final finishing positions would still be reasonable ones). The twelve teams who finished at the top of the Swiss that year would be in Division 1 in the new 2022-23 season, and my team, West Is Best, were one of the lucky twelve. This was naturally always going to be a tricky season to negotiate, and the way the draw was done meant we could expect a rocky start: the top six finishers of the previous season were paired to face the teams finishing 7th-12th in the first six rounds of the season, thus maximizing the chances of exciting promotion and relegation clashes occurring towards the end. Thus, arriving at the Daventry Court Hotel on the Saturday,
Read more

Great Players: Ignatz von Kolisch

Image
I first referenced this video in the piece about Alexander Petrov , but it bears another look: You will notice that  Paul Morphy was dominant throughout his entire competitive career, but his reign as world #1 was interrupted briefly by a player called Kolisch, who then almost immediately disappears from the scene. So this piqued my interest: who was this mysterious Kolisch, and why is his name so much less familiar than those of his contemporaries? Well, the answer, on looking at his  Wikipedia article , seems to be that he just had a very short playing career, and did not play much against the big names of his day. This is backed up by his chessgames page , which shows nearly all his games coming in the years 1857-1867. This did, however, include two triumphs in international tournaments. One was the relatively weak Cambridge 1860 event, but the other was the rather stronger  Paris 1867 event, which would also star future world champion Steinitz. This tournament effectively mark
Read more

British Championship 2022, Round 9

 How would tournament leader Harry Grieve approach Round 9 ? He knew beforehand that a draw would be sufficient to get him a GM norm and a playoff place (or outright victory if N Pert - Arkell was a draw), and many people speculated that he would play a very solid opening to maximize his drawing chances. Not a bit of it; he played a very adventurous opening in which he sacrificed the exchange early on, and ended up sacrificing another one later. For a long while, it wasn't clear what the result would be, and when Pert got an early advantage against Arkell and smoothly converted it, the organizing team were gearing themselves up for a playoff. It turned out not to be necessary; the complications eventually resolved in Grieve's favour, and he ended up delivering mate in a position where his opponent's two queens were useless to prevent it. He thus won the tournament outright, as well as obtaining his final IM norm (and the title) and first GM norm. Nick Pert finished second,
Read more