Simon Winawer

Chessmetrics Ranking: World number two for a total of 12 months in the years 1878-1880

Tournament Career: winner of three super-tournaments:

Vienna 1882 Chess Tournament

German Chess Congress 1883

Paris 1878 Chess Tournament, where he shared first place and lost the tie-break

Matches: Winawer vs Shumov 5:2

  Winawer vs Caro 3:2

What He Deserved It For:

The first half of this series concludes with one of the greats of the second half of the nineteenth century. Winawer burst onto the chess scene in 1867 at the international tournament in Paris, where he unexpectedly finished second. He was one of the best in the world for the next twenty years.

He won three strongly contested super-tournaments. In Paris 1878, he shared first place with Zukertort (a tiebreak was played, which Winawer lost), in Vienna 1882 – which was the strongest chess tournament in history up to that time – he shared first place with Steinitz and outperformed Mason, Mackenzie, Zukertort, Blackburne, Englisch, Paulsen, and Chigorin. He achieved a solo victory at the German Congress in 1883, where Blackburne, Mason, Bird, Paulsen, and Gunsberg could not match him.

Winawer played at a time when match practice was slowly giving way to tournament play, but even so, he was not entirely unfamiliar with match successes. According to retrospectively calculated rankings, he was the second-best player in the world at the end of the 1870s.

Why He Isn’t Higher:

Given that we are concluding the first half of the legends, it is clear that the competition will be increasingly higher. Winawer had a very successful career, which for that time cannot be much criticized. Perhaps the only thing he lacks is a clear position as the best player on the planet, which his contemporaries Morphy or Steinitz achieved.

Best Games:

Simon Winawer vs Wilhelm Steinitz

Nuremberg 1896