Adolf Anderssen

Chessmetrics Ranking: World Number One for a total of seven months in 1861-1862 and 1870

Tournament Career: winner of an incredible nine super-tournaments for his time:

London 1851

London 1862

Baden-Baden 1870

5x winner of the German Chess Congress

London club 1851 chess tournament

Matches: Anderssen vs Dufresne 12:4 (=2)

  Anderssen vs Harrwitz 3:1 (=2)

  Anderssen vs von Kolisch 4:3 (=2)

  Anderssen vs Zukertort 8:3 (=1)

  Anderssen vs de Riviere 2:2 (=1)

  Anderssen vs Paulsen 3:3 (=2)

  Anderssen vs Suhle 3:3 (=2)

What earned him this:

The legendary German master Adolf Anderssen closes the top ten players in history, who remains statistically one of the most successful tournament players in history. Anderssen played at a time when international tournaments were scarce, and winning one was a huge success, much more important than a similar victory today. Anderssen won nine of these tournaments, which has a similar weight as if he had won several dozen in today’s times, placing him among the record holders in this regard. The German master won more than half of the tournaments he participated in. Of these nine victories, three were more significant than the rest, and we will discuss them further.

The first was, of course, the tournament in London in 1851 – the first international chess tournament in history. It was played in a knockout system, and the then thirty-three-year-old Anderssen won the tournament. It was during a break in this tournament that he played an informal game with one of the other participants, Lionel Kieseritzky. This is, of course, possibly the most famous game in history, which Kieseritzky recorded and published despite his loss, and which we know today as the Immortal Game.

The second important triumph is the tournament in London in 1862, which was played for the first time in a round-robin system, which is now the standard for elite super-tournaments. Anderssen confirmed his position as the best player in the world and won the tournament cleanly ahead of Paulsen, Steinitz, Dubois, Blackburne, Owen, and eight others.

And thirdly, we must mention Anderssen’s victory at the tournament in Baden-Baden in 1870. This triumph was somewhat unexpected because Anderssen was already over fifty years old at the time, and the strength of the tournament surpassed all previous ones. The victory was expected more from the almost twenty years younger Steinitz, who finished second behind the great German by half a point. Behind them were Neumann, Blackburne, Paulsen, Winawer, and others.

If tournaments were Anderssen’s strong suit, his relative weakness was matches. And I say relative because he had a very good score in them as well. He managed to defeat most opponents, but there were some with whom he had problems. Among them were Louis Paulsen and Tassilo von der Lasa, who played evenly with him in matches. Anderssen lost a match to Paul Morphy in 1858 and declared the young American the strongest chess player of all time. He was right at that time. In 1866, he lost a match to Wilhelm Steinitz, who was to become the first official world champion twenty years later. Anderssen never held this title because it did not exist, but he was considered the best player in the world for a time, and historical rankings confirm this.

Adolf Anderssen was a respected person during his lifetime and a leading authority in the world of chess. He was popular and respected by his colleagues for his exemplary conduct and sense of fair play, as well as for his chess skills. As a chess player, Anderssen was a chess romantic – his games are full of sacrifices and tactical complications. This style of play was gradually surpassed by Steinitz’s laws of positional play during the second half of the nineteenth century, but this does not detract from Anderssen’s successes and the beauty of his games, which we still enjoy replaying today.

Best Games:

Adolf Anderssen vs Lionel Kieseritzky

London 1851, “Immortal Game”