1858 is a key date in the history of chess, the year when Paul Charles Morphy dazzled the world. This was the time before grandmasters spent their lives working on prepared lines lasting until the early end game, and long games in classical format ended almost invariably in a draw. The style was generally fast and aggressive and gambits were in vogue. Chess was not considered the fulltime profession it is today.
Morphy had breezed through the First American chess congress the year before against such worthy opponents as Paulsen, and then travelled to Europe to demolish the leading players of the day – Löwenthal, Harrwitz and finally Anderssen. He can be credited as the first ‘unofficial’ world champion. Like Fischer after him, Morphy retired from chess soon after he had crushed the chess world, but from his relatively short chess career we have a wealth of championship games, and all sorts of casual games – including simultaneous games, blindfold games and games with odds (with a piece or two removed). And thanks to chess notation, we can follow these games today as freshly as when they were first played.
Morphy is one of the first players we come across in anthologies of chess games, especially for the “Opera game”, probably the most famous game ever played. Morphy’s miniatures were poems of beauty, illustrating fast development and masterful mating combinations. Some of his most enjoyable games were against weaker players to whom he offered heavy odds. It’s a joy to follow Morphy’s brilliancies against the opponents he faced. The short game I’ve chosen below (the last game listed in Sergeant’s “Morphy’s Games of Chess”) is such a game. Morphy playing white took away both his queenside rook and knight before starting!!
Morphy vs T Knight (New Orleans, 1856), white’s QR and QN removed:
And my favourite sacrifice, from a game against Bird. Morphy is black and to play. His stunning move is…. R x f2!! If Bird doesn’t accept the rook sacrifice, he’ll just end up down too much material – Morphy will then gobble up the pawn on h2. So Bird accepts with BxR. And then Morphy continues with his plan – Q-a3!!. Taking the queen would be met by instant checkmate, so Bird has to proceed differently. Morphy overpowers him and wins a brilliant victory.
Even if he was playing more than one and a half centuries ago, Morphy’s style and natural feeling for the game still has something to teach us. Agadmator, the best chess Youtuber today, mentions Morphy’s style at the start of his video “Alpha Zero’s Immortal Zugzwang Game against Stockfish”, in which he was analysing the games of cutting-edge chess engines Google Deepmind’s “AlphaZero” and “Stockfish”. This he had to say:
- “What I enjoy about AlphaZero is that it doesn’t play like an engine, and it really raises a lot of questions. What if old masters like Adolf Anderson and Paul Morphy actually had it right all along, maybe that is the way to play chess. But ever since Kasparov lost that match against Deep Blue in 1997, people started thinking that the machines actually play better chess, and now in 2017 you actually have top grandmasters that are trying to play like Stockfish, and then here comes AlphaZero and says ‘no, that is not the way to play chess’”