The Evergreen Game

Adolf Anderssen played this game against Jean Dufresne, a German chess author and translator rather than a leading tournament player, in an informal encounter in Berlin in 1852. It first reached print in the Deutsche Schachzeitung that September, and annotators have picked the moves apart ever since.

The game turns on White's 19th move, Rad1, played with the queen already hanging and three black pieces aiming at the white king. Anderssen ignores the threat to his queen and instead lines up his last rook against Dufresne's king. The point of the sacrifice only becomes clear several moves later, when the mating combination closes with 24.Bxe7 mate: Black's own pieces block his own king's escape squares. Wilhelm Steinitz, who was not an easy man to impress, later called the closing combination an evergreen in the laurel crown of its originator, which is where the game's name comes from.

For a club player this is a study in calculating several moves beyond the obvious recapture. Before playing 19.Rad1, Anderssen had to see clearly that his own queen could be given up and that the mating net would still close. It rewards patient study of the final five moves on a board rather than a screen.