We apologise for the inconvenience

 For some reason, the annotated games on this blog appear not to be working. I shall try to figure out what's going on.

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Great Players: Ignatz von Kolisch

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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 ef...
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