The Immortal Zugzwang Game

Friedrich Samisch's resignation against Aron Nimzowitsch at Copenhagen in March 1923 is famous for a single detail: when he gave up, White still had a full complement of material and faced no immediate check or capture. Every legal move simply made his position worse, and the game has been known ever since as the Immortal Zugzwang Game, a name that appears to have started in Danish chess circles and was popularised when Nimzowitsch himself annotated the game at length two years later.

Whether the position was genuinely zugzwang in the strict sense, meaning every move loses, has been disputed by later analysts; Wolfgang Heidenfeld argued White actually had one improving move available, which would make the position merely very bad rather than a true zugzwang. The nickname has stuck regardless. Contemporary accounts also disagree on why Samisch resigned when he did, with reports ranging from a long think to genuine time trouble, so the human drama around the final moments should be read as reported rather than settled.

The opening is a Queen's Indian setup with an early fianchetto, though sources give conflicting ECO codes for the exact line, which is why none is given here.