The Immortal Game: Chess's Greatest Masterpiece, Played in the Year Jaques Launched the Staunton Set

Saturday 21 June 1851, Simpson's Grand Divan on the Strand. Adolf Anderssen, a quiet mathematics teacher from Breslau, sits down opposite Lionel Kieseritzky, a Livonian professional who taught chess in Paris at five francs an hour. It is an informal game, a friendly, played during a break in the first international chess tournament the world had ever staged. Nothing is at stake except pride.

What followed took twenty-three moves. Anderssen offered a bishop, then both of his rooks, then his queen, and delivered checkmate with the three minor pieces he had left. Kieseritzky was so astonished by what had been done to him that he sent the moves to Paris for publication. The game has never been out of print since.

And there is a detail most retellings miss. That same London summer, with the Great Exhibition filling the Crystal Palace, the chess world had just adopted a new design of piece: the Staunton pattern, created by Jaques of London and barely two years old. The Immortal Game was played at the very moment our pieces became the pieces. When you picture that queen sliding to f6, you are picturing a Jaques set.

A Casual Game in a Remarkable Summer

London in 1851 was showing off, and it had earned the right. Six million visitors passed through the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace between May and October, a celebration of industry documented in the Victoria and Albert Museum's Great Exhibition archive. Howard Staunton, England's leading player, saw his moment: if the world was coming to London anyway, its chess masters should come too.

Simpson's Grand Divan was the natural venue for an off-duty masterpiece. It had been London's chess room since 1828, a long hall of leather benches where players took coffee and a cigar with their gambits, and where a strong amateur could watch the best players alive for the price of admission. Every serious visitor to the 1851 tournament passed through it. Kieseritzky was practically a resident that summer.

The tournament Staunton organised made history. Yet the game everyone remembers was not part of it. Anderssen and Kieseritzky played their immortal encounter offhand at the Divan, the way you might play a kitchen-table game while dinner cooks. The greatest game in the history of chess was, strictly speaking, a casual.

Twenty-Three Moves of Controlled Recklessness

The game opened with a King's Gambit, the Romantic era's signature: White offers a pawn on move two and asks his opponent to spend the rest of the game proving he can keep it. Kieseritzky grabbed it. By move eleven Anderssen had given up a bishop, and by move nineteen both his rooks were gone, swallowed by Kieseritzky's queen in a corner of the board far from the real action. That was precisely the point.

On move twenty-two came the famous blow: 22.Qf6+, the queen offered for nothing but a single tempo. Kieseritzky had to take it. On move twenty-three, 23.Be7 delivered mate, a bishop and two knights doing the work while almost all of Black's army watched from its starting squares. The full move-by-move account is at stauntonchess.com.

Kieseritzky's response tells you everything about the era. He had just been humiliated, and his first act was to send the moves to Paris for publication in La Régence, the chess journal he helped edit. He had lost, and he knew exactly what he had lost to.

The Tournament Next Door

The formal event surrounding the friendly was historic in its own right. London 1851 was the first international chess tournament ever held: sixteen players in a knockout format, organised by Staunton and timed to ride the Great Exhibition's crowds, as recorded at stauntonchess.com. Anderssen won it, beating Staunton himself along the way, and went home to Breslau as the unofficial best player in the world.

Every board carried the new Staunton-pattern pieces supplied by Jaques. The design had been registered on 1 March 1849 and advertised that September with Staunton's endorsement, and the 1851 tournament was its first great public stage. It proved itself under pressure: stable, instantly readable, no piece mistakable for another. The same pattern sits in our chess sets collection today.

The Romantic Era: Chess Played Like Opera

Chess in 1851 was played in a style historians call Romantic, and the Immortal Game is its purest expression. Attack was a duty. Sacrifices were offered the way compliments were, and declining one carried a faint whiff of cowardice. Defence, by contrast, was barely studied at all, which is partly why Anderssen's fireworks worked.

The era and its heroes are preserved in collections such as the World Chess Hall of Fame, where Anderssen's games sit alongside those of Morphy and Steinitz, the men who would eventually replace romance with science. Modern chess is a different animal: engine preparation, defensive technique, sacrifices calculated to the last decimal. No grandmaster today would lose the way Kieseritzky lost. Yet no engine game has ever been loved the way this one is loved, and that trade tells you what the Romantics understood.

The Pieces You Picture

What gives the Immortal Game its staying power is not just the result but the shape of the thing. Anderssen did not blunder his way into glory; every sacrifice carried the attack one square closer to the Black king. Generations of teachers have used it for exactly that reason. It shows a beginner, in twenty-three moves, that material is only one currency in chess, and that time and initiative can buy more than rooks ever will.

One more thing about that summer. The pieces on the Divan's boards were new. Jaques of London, founded in 1795, created the Staunton chess set; Nathaniel Cook, working with Jaques, registered the design on 1 March 1849, and it went on sale that September, championed in the press by Staunton himself. The original notices survive in the newspaper archives held at the British Library.

The design solved a real problem. Before 1849, sets varied so wildly that masters sometimes refused to play on unfamiliar pieces. The Staunton pattern gave every player the same visual language, which is why the FIDE handbook still specifies Staunton-style pieces for competitive play, 175 years on.

There is a reason every Jaques knight still takes longer to make than the rest of the set combined: the head is carved rather than turned, and that has not changed since 1849. You can see the same silhouettes the 1851 masters played with in our luxury chess sets. The Immortal Game belongs to chess. The pieces it is remembered on belong to us.

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