Great Players: Adolf Anderssen

 

Adolf Anderssen

As I mentioned in my article on von der Lasa, there were two players with reasonable claims on the title of "world's best player" in the early 1850s, and today's article is about the more famous of the two, Adolf Anderssen (1818-79).

Whereas von der Lasa's great achievements were all in match play, Anderssen was a specialist in the then more recent discipline of tournament play; he won both the first recognised international tournament (London 1851, in which he beat Staunton in the semi-finals), and the first major all-play-all (London 1862). In total, his tournament career ran to sixteen tournaments over 27 years, of which he won or tied for first in eleven; the only tournament in which he failed to get a top-three finish was his final event, Paris 1878, and even there he achieved a plus score.

His record in match play was much more patchy, including losses to Morphy in 1858 (shortly before Morphy's retirement from competitive play) and Steinitz in 1866, a match widely seen as one passing the baton on to the next generation.

 Anderssen's greatest skill as a chess player was as a ferocious attacking player, and the games in this post all demonstrate this. Against the relatively weak defensive play of the mid-19th century, this was very successful; it would only be with the rise of Steinitz that good defensive techniques would really start to be worked out.



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