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Karl Ernst Adolf Anderssen (6 July 1818 – 13 March 1879)"Anderssen, Adolf" in The New Encyclopædia Britannica. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 15th edn., 1992, Vol. 1, p. 385. was a German chess master. He won the great international tournaments of 1851 and 1862, but lost matches to Paul Morphy in 1858, and to Wilhelm Steinitz in 1866. Accordingly, he is generally regarded as having been the world's leading chess player from 1851 to 1858, and leading active player from 1862 to 1866, although the title of World Chess Champion did not yet exist.
Anderssen became the most successful tournament player in Europe, winning over half the events he entered, including the very strong Baden-Baden 1870 chess tournament. He achieved most of these successes when he was over the age of 50.
Anderssen is famous today for his brilliant sacrificial attacking play, particularly in the Immortal Game (1851) and the Evergreen Game (1852). He was an important figure in the development of , driving forward the transition from the "Old School" of problem composition to the elegance and complexity of modern compositions. He was also one of the most likeable of chess masters and became an elder statesman of the game, to whom others turned for advice or arbitration.
When Anderssen was nine years old, his father taught him how to play chess. Anderssen said that as a boy, he learned the strategy of the game from a copy of William Lewis' book Fifty Games Between Labourdonnais and McDonnell (1835).
Anderssen's preparations for the 1851 London International Tournament produced a surge in his playing strength: he played over 100 games in early 1851 against strong opponents including Carl Mayet, Ernst Falkbeer, Max Lange and Jean Dufresne. The 1851 International Tournament was a knock-out event in which pairs of competitors played short matches, and Anderssen won it by beating Lionel Kieseritzky, József Szén, Staunton and Marmaduke Wyvill – by margins of at least two games in every case. His prize was two-thirds of the total prize fund of £500, i.e. about £335; can be viewed online at or downloaded as PDF from Internet Archive that is equivalent to about £240,000 ($370,200) in 2006's money.Conversion based on average incomes, which are the most appropriate measure for several days' hard work. If we use average prices for the conversion, the result is about £27,000. When Anderssen and Szén found they were to play each other, they agreed that, if either won the tournament, the other would receive one-third of the prize; this does not appear to have been considered in any way unethical.
Although most chess books regard Wilhelm Steinitz as the first true world champion, one of the organizers of the 1851 London International Tournament had said the contest was for "the baton of the World's Chess Champion". In fact Anderssen was not described as "the world champion", but the tournament established Anderssen as the world's leading chess player. The London Chess Club, which had fallen out with Staunton and his colleagues, organised a tournament that was played a month later and included several players who had competed in the International Tournament. The result was the same – Anderssen won.
Anderssen played the curious opening move 1.a3 in three games of his match against Morphy, and broke even with it (one loss, one draw, one win). This opening move, now referred to as Anderssen's Opening, has never been popular in serious competition.
After the match with Morphy, Anderssen played two matches against Ignác Kolisch, one of the leading players of the time, who later became a wealthy banker and patron of chess. Anderssen drew their match in 1860 and narrowly won in 1861 (5/9; won four, drew two, lost three; Kolisch was ahead at the half-way stage).
Shortly after the tournament, he played a match against tournament runner-up Paulsen, ending in a draw (3 wins, 3 losses, 2 draws). World Chess Championship : 1862 Anderssen vs. Paulsen In 1864, he drew another match (3 wins, 3 losses, and 2 draws) against Berthold Suhle, who was a strong player and respected chess writer.In collaboration with Gustav Neumann, see the "Lehrbücher" ("textbooks") section of Wilhelm Steinitz respected their work, see his review of Wormald's " The Chess Openings" quoted at
The Leipzig 1877 tournament was organised in his honour and named the "Anderssen-Feier" (Anderssen Celebration); "Anderssen-Feier", Deutsche Schachzeitung, 1877 Anderssen finished second in the tournament behind Louis Paulsen.
Still at Leipzig, Anderssen lost a match against tournament winner Louis Paulsen (three wins, one draw, and five losses). Matches were Anderssen's relative weakness; his only match win in this period was in 1868, against the 26-year-old Johann Zukertort (eight wins, one draw, and three losses).
Although outclassed by Morphy, and to a lesser extent by Steinitz, Anderssen has been called the first modern chess master."The World's Great Chess Games", Reuben Fine, McKay 1976, p.17
Arpad Elo, inventor of the Elo rating system, retroactively calculated ratings through history, and estimated that Anderssen was the first player with a rating over 2600. Chessmetrics ranks Anderssen as one of the top two players for most of the period from 1859 to 1873, and as the strongest player in the world seven months distributed between 1860 and 1870.
Steinitz rated Anderssen as one of the two greatest attacking players of his time: "We all may learn from Morphy and Anderssen how to conduct a attack, and perhaps I myself may not have learnt enough." Although Anderssen is regarded as a member of the "heroic" attacking school, he was not in favour of mindless aggression, for example he said: "Move that one of your pieces, which is in the worst plight, unless you can satisfy yourself that you can derive immediate advantage by an attack", a principle more recently labelled "Makogonov's rule". According to Fine, his approach to was haphazard and he totally failed to understand why Morphy won.
Anderssen's home town was so proud of him that in 1865 Breslau University awarded him an honourary doctorate.
The "heroic" attacking school of play to which Anderssen belonged was eclipsed by Steinitz' positional approach – by 1894 it was generally acknowledged that the only way to beat Steinitz was to apply Steinitz' principles.
Anderssen has had a more enduring influence on chess problem composition. He started composing in the last years of the "Old School", whose compositions were fairly similar to realistic positions and featured spectacular moves, multiple sacrifices and few variations. He was one of the most skillful composers of his time, and his work forms an early stage of the "Transition Period", between the mid-1840s and the early 1860s, when many of the basic problem ideas were discovered, the requirement for game-like positions was abandoned and the introduction of composing competitions (the first of which was in 1854) forced judges to decide on what features were the most desirable in a problem.
Outside the field of chess problems, Anderssen was not a prolific author. He edited the magazine Schachzeitung der Berliner Schachgesellschaft (later called Deutsche Schachzeitung) from 1846 to 1865, however, and was co-editor with Gustav Neumann of Neue Berliner Schachzeitung from 1864 to 1867.
| Ahead of Marmaduke Wyvill, Elijah Williams, Howard Staunton, József Szén, Hugh Alexander Kennedy, Bernhard Horwitz, Henry Edward Bird, Lionel Kieseritzky, Carl Mayet, Johann Löwenthal, Edward Löwe, Alfred Brodie, James Mucklow, Samuel Newham and E.S. Kennedy. A knock-out tournament in which the contestants played mini-matches in each round, increasing from best-of-3 in the 1st round to best-of-8 in the final. Anderssen himself beat Kieseritzky, Szen, Staunton and Wyvill – his closest mini-match was +4−2=1 in the final against Wyvill. |
| Ahead of Karl Meyerhofer, Daniel Harrwitz, Frederick Deacon, Kieseritzky, Horwitz, Szabo, Löwe and Ehrmann. Apparently intended to be round-robin, but the weaker players quickly dropped out. |
| 8-player knock-out tournament in which the contestants played just 1 game in each round. Anderssen beat Harrwitz in the 1st round, and lost to Löwenthal in the 2nd round. Löwenthal drew the final against Samuel Boden, then Boden retired. |
| Ahead of Louis Paulsen, (11/13), Rev. Owen (10/13), George Alcock MacDonnell, Serafino Dubois, Wilhelm Steinitz and 8 others. One of the first successful round-robin tournaments. |
| Anderssen and Max Lange tied for 1st; the order after the playoff was (1) Lange, (2) Anderssen; all finished ahead of Wilfried Paulsen, Johannes Zukertort and Emil Schallopp. |
| Anderssen and Louis Paulsen tied for 1st; the order after the playoff was (1) Anderssen, (2) Paulsen; all finished ahead of Zukertort, Johannes von Minckwitz, Schallopp and Alexander Alexander. |
| Ahead of Zukertort, von Minckwitz, Schallopp and Wilfried Paulsen and Richard Hein. |
| Ahead of Steinitz, Gustav Neumann, Joseph Henry Blackburne, Louis Paulsen, Cecil Valentine De Vere, Szymon Winawer, Samuel Rosenthal, von Minckwitz and Adolf Stern. |
| Anderssen, von Minckwitz and Louis Paulsen tied for 1st; the order after the playoff was (1) Paulsen, (2) Anderssen, (3) Minckwitz; all finished ahead of Karl Pitschel, Carl Göring and Wilfried Paulsen. |
| Anderssen and Samuel Mieses tied for 1st; then Anderssen won a playoff game. |
| Ahead of Neumann, Göring, Schallopp and Pitschel. |
| Behind Steinitz (10/11: 22½/25) and Blackburne; ahead of Rosenthal (7½/11: 17/28), Louis Paulsen, Henry Edward Bird, Max Fleissig, Josef Heral, Philipp Meitner, Oscar Gelbfuhs, Adolf Schwarz and Pitschel. This tournament had a very unusual scoring system: each player played a 3-game mini-match with each of the others and scored 1 for a won mini-match and ½ for a drawn mini-match. The numbers before the colons (:) are the points awarded; the other 2 numbers are the usual "games won / games played" scoring. |
| Anderssen, Goering and Pitschel tied for 1st; the order after the playoff was (1) Anderssen, (2=) Goering and Pitschel; all finished ahead of Louis Paulsen, Schallopp and Carl Berber. |
| Behind Louis Paulsen (9/11); tied with Zukertort (8½/11); ahead of Winawer (7½/11), Goering, Berthold Englisch, Schallopp and 5 others. This tournament was specially arranged to honour the 50th anniversary of Anderssen's learning the chess moves. |
| Behind Louis Paulsen (8/9) and Adolf Schwarz (6½/9); ahead of von Minckwitz (5/9), Wilfried Paulsen (4½/9) and 5 others. |
| Anderssen was in poor health. The event was won by Winawer and Zukertort. |
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