In his column in today's TIMES, Ray Keene features Game 16 from the 4th McDonnell-de la Bourdonnias match; and the puzzle is taken from Game 5 of the 3rd match. Keene writes -
'The excellent news has come through that the English Chess Federation has won the option from the International Chess Federation to stage the World Championship in London's Olympic year, 2012 ..... To celebrate the English Chess Federation's tremendous initiative in securing the option ... I shall be devoting a series to former championships held in Lodon.
'Although 1886 is widely recognised as the date of the first official championship, it is evident that formal matches to establish the strongest player in the worldwide chess fraternity date back to at least 1834 when Labourdonnais and Macdonnell fought out an epic series of encounters in London. For this reason I tend to regard the victorious Frenchman Labourdonnais as the first de facto world champion.
'The claims of his 18th-century countryman, Philidor, are also strong. However Philidor's surviving exploits are largely blindfold, simultaneous and odds games, with no proper record of any set match against a close and worthy rival.
'Over the next few weeks I shall be giving games by Labourdonnais, Staunton, Anderssen, Steinitz, Kasparov, Short and Kramnik.'
Keene gives the score of the spectacular Game 16 of the 4th McDonnell-Bourbonnais match (Game 62 in the series) adding "my notes ... are based on those by Garry Kasparov in the first volume of My Great Predecessors series (Everyman Chess)"; as his winning move puzzle Keene gives the finale of Game 5 of the 3rd match (Game 39 of the series).
In my original 1980s article on McDonnell, I told of how the games of the 1834 matches continue to inspire. I quoted Garry Kasparov, writing in Kasparov Teaches Chess (London, 1986), who related that he learnt the moves at the age of 5. One year later his parents took him to a chess group at the Young Pioneers Club in his home town of Baku. He was shown the 62nd game of the 1834 matches. Kasparov continued:
Our instructor, in his desire to convince the novices of the paradoxical characher of chess, set up a position on the board at one of the first session. This position, where the small pawns were victorious over the enemy, was so surprising that it seemed like a fairy tale, and I was unable to live without chess after seeing it. I have admired the position ever since.
Kasparov concludes his discussion of the game in Volume 1 of My Great Predecessors with -
'This inimitable finish is one of the most remarkable positions to have occurred in the 19th century!'
Keene's comment is -
'An astonishing position.'
Yet the names continue to give trouble. The French champion is variously de la Bourdonnais, La Bourdonnais, Labourdonnais or Bourdonnais; while the Irish contender is McDonnell, MacDonnell or Macdonnell (Keene uses two forms in his article).
Of the remaining champions mentioned by Keene, Staunton defeated St Amant in Paris in 1843 to win the de facto world championship. Staunton organised the first international chess tournament in London in 1851 (coinciding with the Great Exhibition). To his own surprise, Staunton didn't win the tournament. The laurel went to the German Professor, Adolf Anderssen, who was for some years afterward recognised as the world's strongest player (barring a short interlude when the visiting American, Morphy, shone like a meteor).
Keene himself organised three of the London confrontations mentioned viz. Karpov v Kasparov (1986), Kasparov v Short (1993) and Kasparov v Kramnik (2000).
Utterberg writes-
"the most visible commentators on the de la Bourdonnais versus McDonnell games are Lewis, Greenwood Walker, de la Bourdonnais himself, Staunton, Saint-Amant, Anderssen (reputed to be greatly influenced by the matches), and Morphy (as a columnist for the New York Ledger, seemingly concerned with critiquing Staunton's notes as well as the games). Much of this information was brought together in the periodical La Stratégie in the years 1874-7, which is given as the immediate source for the games in the Oxford Encyclopedia."
