Coach
Steinitz named this game. Writing a fortnight after Anderssen's death in 1879, he called the nineteenth move an evergreen in the laurel crown of the departed chess hero, and said the combination behind it had hardly an equal in over-the-board play. A hundred and forty-three years later Daniel King replayed the same score and reached the opposite verdict: he would have declined the sacrifice, taken the queen with a quiet knight move and gone home, and he thinks Black played badly enough to deserve what happened. Both are annotated here at the same moves, so the argument runs alongside the game rather than after it.
Before move one
Step through the game; it stops where a move is worth finding.
Jean Dufresne
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Adolf Anderssen
Arrow keys step through the game. Explore tries your own moves; Stockfish answers.
- At every black turn, ask whether castling is available. Both annotators keep answering yes, right up to the move where it stops being true.
- Count what the queen costs. Steinitz and King disagree about the combination and agree about this: the early queen sortie pays for White's whole attack in tempi.
- Watch the e-file after White castles. The rook arrives on it before Black's knight does, and the pin it creates is what the finish is built on.
- When the sacrifice comes, look for the quiet alternative first. King's whole objection is that a simple knight move won the queen and nobody had to calculate anything.
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