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chess community.
    The Immortal Game grabbed me at first not for its blindingly brilliant moves—what did I know from great chess?—but for its human drama. This was supposed to be a forgettable practice game, a throwaway. No one, least of all the two players, had any idea that they were about to produce one of chess’s all-time gems, a game some would consider the most remarkable ever played.

    A DOLF A NDERSSEN VS . L IONEL K IESERITZKY
    J UNE 21, 1851
    L ONDON

    1. e4 *2
    (White King’s Pawn to e4)

    It began commonly enough. Adolf Anderssen, playing White, moved his King’s Pawn forward two squares. (White always moves first in chess, and in doing so carries an advantage that is roughly akin to serving in tennis. The first to move not only gets to decide on the early trajectory of a game; he also gets a head start in the development *3 of his pieces. In master-level chess, where the games are often so close that one single move makes all the difference, White’s tiny head start is often conclusive.)
    Lionel Kieseritzky responded with exactly the same move, mirroring White’s move by pushing
his
King’s Pawn forward two squares.

    1….e5
    (Black King’s Pawn to e5)

    The King’s Pawn
opening
—a very popular opener then and probably the most popular still—has both players jockeying right away for the center of the board, a strategic asset, and making room for the Queen and/or King’s Bishop to come out early. It was a quiet beginning for a casual game, held at Simpson’s Grand Divan Tavern, the smoky men’s club and chess café on the Strand boulevard in London.
    These were two of the greatest chess players in the world at the time, but very few people were likely watching this throwaway practice game—the real action was a mile away at the St. George’s Chess Club at Cavendish Square, where Anderssen, Kieseritzky, and fourteen other world-class players were competing in chess’s first-ever true international tournament.
    Kieseritzky, a former math teacher from Estonia, had traveled from Paris, where he dominated the chess scene at the Café de La Régence, giving lessons and playing games for five francs an hour. His specialty was defeating lesser players even after removing one or more of his pieces at the game’s start. (This is known as “giving odds.” Playing without one of your Knights, for example, is giving Knight odds.) In 1849 Kieseritzky had founded his own chess journal, naming it
La Régence
after his favorite haunt. In 1851 he traveled to London as one of the leading favorites to win the tournament.
    The German-born Anderssen, also a math professor, was known for both his expert play and his spirited chess problems, which in 1842 he had collected in a book called
Aufgaben für Schachspieler
(“Problems for Chessplayers”). Serious problemists and serious players know how very different their tasks are from one another—much like the highly distinct worlds of musical composition (Beethoven) and performance (Yo-Yo Ma). But Anderssen appeared to cross over effortlessly from one world to the other, becoming increasingly interested in chess play and, in 1848, forcing a leading player, Daniel Harrwitz, into a five-game-to-five-game draw. It was a startling accomplishment for a problemist not previously thought to possess world-class playing skills, and it earned Anderssen his London invitation. Still, in 1851 he was given little chance to do well among the London field of sixteen, the rest of the world’s top players arriving from St. Petersburg, Budapest, Berlin, Paris, and London itself for the three-round, seven-week tournament.
    This was a gathering of chess talent never before seen, and aficionados expected the games to be proportionately exciting—bold, counterintuitive, theory-busting. They anticipated a caliber of chess that people would talk about for centuries to come. What no one could possibly have foreseen, as the tournament captured so much attention and raised so many