The Pawn Storm at Westminster

Alexander McDonnell, a London merchant born in Belfast, and Louis de La Bourdonnais, the leading French master of his day, played six matches against each other at the Westminster Chess Club in London between June and October 1834, a marathon of eighty five games that is usually considered the first great international rivalry in chess history. This game, the sixteenth of their fourth match, is the single most famous game to come out of the whole series.

La Bourdonnais chooses the Sicilian Defence, still a rare and slightly suspect opening at the time, and the game turns into a demonstration of what a connected pawn mass can do once it starts rolling forward. From around move twenty, Black's pawns on the queenside and in the centre advance almost without piece support, and by the time White's rooks and queen try to intervene it is already too late. The final position, with a lone black pawn about to promote on e2 while surrounded by white pieces that cannot stop it, is one of the most reproduced diagrams in nineteenth century chess literature.

It is worth a club player's time precisely because it does not rely on a single tactical shot. The lesson is patient pawn play: advancing a connected mass with support is often stronger than looking for the flashy sacrifice, an idea that took the rest of the century to be fully absorbed into chess theory.