Great Players: Paul Morphy

 

Paul Morphy

 One of the interesting features of chess is how the development of chess in a region can be sparked by the emergence of a world-class player who captures the public imagination; the number of strong Indian players who have made it to 2600 since Viswanathan Anand reached the elite in the 1990s is a good example, as is the rising profile of Norway since Magnus Carlsen did the same thing in the 2000s.

And the subject of this piece, Paul Morphy (1837-1884), is one of the earliest examples of the phenomenon. The USA had some strong players in the mid-19th century, but nobody really on the level of Europe's best; since then, though, they have had world-class players in most eras, including one world champion (Fischer) and three other players who challenged directly for the world title (Marshall, Reshevsky and Caruana).

So what was Morphy like as a player, and how did he come to have such a hold over the popular imagination? Well, one answer is that he was unquestionably a child prodigy; he was only twelve when he won a match against Johann Löwenthal, then one of Europe's leading players. 

Another is the briefness of his chess career coupled with his dominance during it: almost all his competitive chess was played in 1857 and 1858, including victory in his only tournament, and an aggregate score of 13-4 in his favour in his two matches against Anderssen, after which he retired in search of a law career. (The law career did not pan out, but he decided not to return to chess.)

And a third reason is the nature of his chess itself: it hit the sweet spot of both being fundamentally principled and aesthetically pleasing: his technique of developing and controlling the centre early on, in order to get an advantage from which tactics can flow, is a perfectly reasonable strategy to this day.

How strong a player Morphy was by modern standards is an open question, and a favourite topic of internet discussion. My estimate is that he was somewhere in the 2200-2300 region; it's hard to judge because the players of his day weren't skilled enough to reliably find his weaknesses and direct play towards them.

Great Players Index







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ef...
Read more

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

4NCL Congress, 9-11 July 2021

 So it turns out congress chess has started to make a return, in the shape of the long-running series of 4NCL Congresses . The 25th such event was held in Leamington Spa over the past weekend, and attracted a total entry of 130 entrants across 3 sections. Among the entrants were three grandmasters, Nigel Davies, Keith Arkell and Peter Wells, but none of those players actually won the Open section. First place was instead shared by two strong young players, FM Jonah Willow (19) and CM Aaravamudhan Balaji (16), with 4½/5. Balaji's performance was especially impressive, including a win against Wells and a draw against Arkell on his way to a rating gain of 67.2 points. Arkell finished third on 4 points. I've annotated three of the games; thank you to Jonathan Tait for giving help on how to display them.
Read more