The Battle of Hastings

Wilhelm Steinitz was fifty nine years old and no longer the world champion when he sat down against Curt von Bardeleben in round ten of the great Hastings tournament, played on 17 August 1895, and this game is usually cited as proof that his combinative eye had not dulled with age. It won the tournament's first brilliancy prize.

The position exploded with 22.Rxe7+, a rook sacrifice that leaves every white piece attacked at once, yet Black cannot take anything without losing faster. Steinitz had calculated a forced mate reaching all the way to move 35, driving the black king across the board with checks from 25.Rxh7+ through to 35.Qd6 mate, before von Bardeleben would ever need to move again. The popular story is that von Bardeleben, seeing the mate coming, simply got up and left the tournament hall without resigning, and that Steinitz then walked round the table and demonstrated the winning line to the assembled crowd. It is a wonderful story, though chess historians researching contemporary local newspaper reports of the round have found no mention of any walkout, so the dramatic version may have grown in the telling.

Whatever actually happened at the board, the calculation itself is the real lesson: work out that a combination is completely forced before playing the first sacrificial move, the same discipline Steinitz used to see all the way to move 35 before committing to 22.Rxe7+.