Paul Charles Morphy was an American chess player. He is considered to have been the greatest chess master of his era and is often considered the unofficial World Chess Champion. A chess prodigy, he was called "The Pride and Sorrow of Chess" because he had a brilliant chess career but retired from the game while still young. Commentators agree that he was far ahead of his time as a chess player, though there is disagreement on how his play ranks compared to modern players.
Howard Staunton was an English chess master who is generally regarded as the world's strongest player from 1843 to 1851, largely as a result of his 1843 victory over Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant. He promoted a chess set of clearly distinguishable pieces of standardised shape – the Staunton pattern promulgated by Nathaniel Cooke – that is still the style required for competitions. He was the principal organiser of the first international chess tournament in 1851, which made England the world's leading chess centre and caused Adolf Anderssen to be recognised as the world's strongest player.
William Steinitz was an Austrian and later American chess player, and the first official World Chess Champion, from 1886 to 1894. He was also a highly influential writer and chess theoretician.
Henry Edward Bird was an English chess player, author and accountant. He wrote the books Chess History and Reminiscences and An Analysis of Railways in the United Kingdom.
The Turk, also known as the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player, was a fraudulent chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854 it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax. Constructed and unveiled in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804) to impress Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, the mechanism appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent, as well as perform the knight's tour, a puzzle that requires the player to move a knight to occupy every square of a chessboard exactly once.
Johann Jacob Löwenthal was a professional chess master. He was among the top six players of the 1850s.
Andrew Eden Soltis is an American chess grandmaster, author and columnist. He was inducted into the United States Chess Hall of Fame in September 2011.
Romantic chess was the style of chess prevalent from the 18th century until the 1880s. Chess games of this period emphasized quick, tactical maneuvers rather than long-term strategic planning. The Romantic era of play was followed by the Scientific, Hypermodern, and New Dynamism eras. Games during this era generally consisted of 1.e4 openings such as the King's Gambit and Giuoco Piano. Queen-side pawn openings were not popular and seldom played. The Romantic era is generally considered to have ended with the 1873 Vienna tournament where Wilhelm Steinitz popularized positional play and the closed game. This domination ushered in a new age of chess known as the "Modern", or Classical school, which would last until the 1930s when hypermodernism began to become popular.
Samuel or Salomon Lipschütz was a chess player and author. He was chess champion of the United States from 1892 to 1894.
Daniel Willard Fiske was an American librarian and scholar, born on November 11, 1831, at Ellisburg, New York.
William Schlumberger was a European chess master. He is known to have taught Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant to play chess and as the operator of The Turk, a chess-playing machine which was purported to be an automaton. It was Bavarian musician and showman Johann Nepomuk Mälzel who hired him to operate The Turk. Schlumberger acted as the Turk's director in Europe and in the United States until his death from yellow fever in 1838.
John Gaughan is an American manufacturer of magic acts and equipment for magicians based in Los Angeles, California. His style of work is classic, not based heavily on machinery and technology.
The American Chess Association (ACA) was a chess organization founded in New York City in 1857. The organization organized the first major chess tournament, the First American Chess Congress, in the United States on October 6, 1857. On November 11, 1857, Paul Morphy, who had defeated Louis Paulsen in the tournament, was presented with a silver service at the prize giving by Colonel Charles D. Mead, President of the ACA. On behalf of Paul Morphy, the American Chess Association offered a $5,000 challenge to any player in Europe to contest a match with the recently crowned ACA champion.
Chess Monthly may refer to:
The American Chess Congress was a series of chess tournaments held in the United States, a predecessor to the current U.S. Chess Championship. It had nine editions, the first played in October 1857 and the last in August 1923.
Napoleon Marache was born in France and moved to the United States at around 12 years of age. He learned the game of chess around 1844, and immediately became a devotee. He began composing chess problems and writing about chess the following year. In the mid-19th century, he was both one of America's first chess journalists and one of its leading players. In 1866, he published Marache's Manual of Chess, which was one of the country's first books on chess, and also one of its first books on backgammon. He is perhaps best known today for having lost a famous game to Paul Morphy.
The Staunton–Morphy controversy concerns the failure of negotiations in 1858 for a chess match between Howard Staunton and Paul Morphy and later interpretations of the actions of the two players. The details of the events are not universally agreed, and accounts and interpretations often show strong national bias.
Philip Walsingham Sergeant was a British professional writer on chess and popular historical subjects. He collaborated on the fifth (1933), sixth (1939), and seventh (1946) editions of Modern Chess Openings, an important reference work on the chess openings. He also wrote biographical game collections of Paul Morphy, Rudolf Charousek, and Harry Nelson Pillsbury, and other important books such as A Century of British Chess (1934) and Championship Chess (1938).
James A. Leonard was a young American chess master, who grew up as a son of poor Irish immigrants in New York City. He learned to play chess at age 16 or 17. Before his 20th birthday, he was already famous for his fierce attacking play and prowess at blindfold chess, at which he played as many as ten games simultaneously.
Jean-Louis Preti was a musician and chess writer, specializing in the chess endgame.
