On 21 June 1851, two men played a casual game of chess in London. Nobody wrote down the venue, because nobody expected the game to matter. It was an off-hand encounter, played during a break at the first great international tournament, and it counted for nothing in the standings. Within a few years it had a name that stuck: the Immortal Game.
Adolf Anderssen, who would go on to win that tournament, was White. Lionel Kieseritzky, who made his living teaching chess in Paris and playing for five francs an hour at the Café de la Régence, was Black.
A game from another age
This was the age of Romantic chess, a style that prized attack over everything. Material was held in contempt, and refusing a gambit was considered slightly ungentlemanly. Anderssen duly offered the King's Gambit — 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 3.Bc4 — and Kieseritzky answered with 3...Qh4+ 4.Kf1 b5!, the Bryan Countergambit, a line he himself had analysed deeply and which still sometimes bears his name.
Then his queen went for a long walk: h6, g5, g6, g5, f6, chased around the board while the rest of the black army stayed home. When the g8 knight crept back to its starting square on move 14, the only black piece left off its post was that queen.
Black grabbed what he could — 17...Qxb2 — and Anderssen played the move that made the game immortal:
18.Bd6!
The bishop steps in front of the black king and offers both of Anderssen's rooks. Kieseritzky accepted: 18...Bxg1 took the first. 19.e5! threatened mate in two while offering the second, and 19...Qxa1+ took it, with check. After 20.Ke2, Black had netted a huge pile of material — and his king was a dead man. The finish, as every textbook prints it:
21.Nxg7+ Kd8 22.Qf6+!! — the queen herself thrown into the fire — 22...Nxf6 23.Be7#.
Mate, delivered by Anderssen's last three fighting pieces: two knights and a bishop. It is a model mate — every surviving white piece takes part, and the mated king has exactly one reason per square to stay put. Count the bill: a bishop, both rooks, the queen, all sacrificed; Kieseritzky, who lost only three pawns, gave up the game all the same. 1-0.
The footnote
There is one, though. Kieseritzky's own account ends earlier: he resigned around move twenty, and it is suspected the famous final moves were never played over the board at all — Anderssen may simply have announced the mate. The queen sacrifice and 23.Be7# that every chess book displays are, in all likelihood, a continuation appended to the real game.
Kieseritzky, to his credit, was impressed. He telegraphed the moves to his club in Paris, and La Régence — the journal he helped edit — published them in July 1851. Four years later, the Austrian master Ernst Falkbeer published his own analysis and gave the game the name it still carries.
Nobody plays the Bryan Countergambit like this anymore, and modern analysis finds several quieter wins for White at move 18; Robert Hübner names at least three. Kasparov's remark was that had Black found them, the chess world would have lost one of its crown jewels. True, and none of it matters. For one afternoon, a player treated material as something to spend — and the receipt, a mate on move 23, is still being reprinted 175 years later.