The Immortal Checkmate

If you’re a reader who has uttered this euphoric word in its real context, I’m sure you’d agree that it sums up every emotion you’ve felt brewing inside your brain in a swift punch. The glee a seasoned chess player feels at having perfected a war strategy out of the trillion possible moves using his 16 piece army is almost orgasmic. Pardon me, I’ll stamp out the ‘almost’. It is orgasmic.

When I was eight years old, my mother observed my fast-growing horizontal frame, and suggested I join a ‘class’ of some sort. I found myself being shepherded the following week for an activity my parents thought would make me interact with boys of my age – chess coaching.

Luckily for me, I found myself quite at home among the cold fury of my wooden chess men. I had a picture of Garry Kasparov instead of Sachin Tendulkar in my room, something which my friends burst into helpless laughter about till date. I’d spend hours playing, and studying famous games while the others watched Shaktimaan and played tree-to-tree. On my tenth birthday as a special treat, my coach and I analysed a game that had been played on the same day more than a hundred years before I was born. A game so utterly brilliant, it bordered more on madness than genius. We chess people, know it as ‘The Immortal game’.

In 1851, the first international chess tournament was held in England. Invitations were sent to some of the most renowned chess players in Europe for a knockout style event to declare ‘the world’s chess champion’. The foggy streets of London welcomed the likes of Adolf Anderssen, Lionel Kieseritzsky, Howard Stauton and a bunch of names I won’t bother boring you with. Anderssen was the eventual winner of the event, and went on to be regarded as one of the finest chess players of all time.

But our story isn’t about his tournament. It isn’t about his victory. It’s about a simple practice match he played against Kieseritzsky in a café on the 21’st of June, which ‘screwed Kieser inside out’ by the time it got over. It was a befitting match for the longest day of the year.

I know a majority of you won’t understand chess lingo. But to keep it simple, Anderssen was playing with white. Kieseritsky chose black. Anderssen opened by offering his kingside bishop’s pawn, and used this move to gain control of the centre of the board. He slowly capitalised on this start, building his momentum to play a game that relied on an extreme amount of guesswork coupled with some fabulous calculations. Around a quarter into the game, Anderssen had pinned the black queen, leaving his own bishop up for grabs. What you must remember is that he wasn’t in a position where he would have surely captured the queen. He was just restricting her movement. To lose a bishop in order to restrict the queen’s walking space was unorthodox, but Anderssen did it anyway. It was the first of his four sacrifices that would shoot this game to the fame it has reached today. Anderssen had a vague outline of what he was doing, and he decided to be firm and attack whenever he could get the chance. In a crown jewel move at half point, Anderssen used both his Rooks as a bait to set up a trap of a lifetime, blocking out the black King.

When Kieseritzsky fell for it and realised what Anderssen had done, popular legend goes that he resigned with a smile (which was very rare, he was one of the most arrogant players back then) and continued to play just to see whether Anderssen would win the way he thought he would. Anderssen picked this up and announced the final checkmate move out loud. For a chess player, this is hilarious. It’s like saying, “Okay…So you just lost…Now let me show you how I’m about to defeat you.”

Anderssen’s genius didn’t end there. He planned the checkmate in such a way, that black was forced to take his queen as a final magnificent sacrifice, before he checkmated Kieseritzsky with his remaining Bishop, rubbing salt to his wounds. It was something like Federer nodding to Nadal and saying “I’m going to lose this point now, because I know you’re going to play a bad one the next time you serve and give me the match. There you go…Double fault! Game, Set, Match – me”.

Kieseritzsky recorded this match and shared it with all the other competitors. From then on, he was known till his death as ‘the immortal loser’. The world acknowledged its significance, and till date, not a match has been played that rivals its contribution to chess literature. Anderssen proved something, which has stayed with his fans for a lifetime: “Victory does not depend on the pieces that you lose. It depends entirely on the standing pieces that you can continue playing with!”