Introduction

  Hello Boys and girls! My name was Adolf Anderson and frankly, I never would have thought that I would have been considered the world’s leading chess player during the 1850s and 1860s.

Early Life

I was born in Breslau in 1818. I lived there for the most of my life, with and supporting my widowed mother and my unmarried sister. I never got married either. After graduating high school, I studied mathematics and philosophy. After graduating from university, at the age of 29, I took a position at the Fredric’s-Gymnasium as an instructor and later as Professor of Mathematics. I lived a quiet, stable and respectable middle class life. Though my career was teaching mathematics, my hobby and passion has always been playing chess.

Anderson’s Chess Career

My father taught me how to play chess when I was 9. My first attention came to the chess world when I published “Task for chess players”, which included a collection of 60 chess problems. I continued to publish problems for many years, both in magazines and as a second collection.  

 These brought me to the attention of the “Berlin Pleiades” group, which included some of the strongest players of that time, and I played matches against some of them. My development as a player was relatively slow, largely because I could spare neither the time nor the money to play many matches against strong players. Nevertheless by 1846 I was able to put up a good fight against another Pleiades member, who may have been the world’s strongest player at the time.
Later, I drew a match with one of the professional players of that time. On the basis of this match and my general chess reputation, I was invited to represent German chess at the first International Chess Tournament and time by time, I played against strong opponents and won possibly all the matches.

I was quite soundly defeated by Paul Morphy who toured Europe in 1858, but Morphy retired from chess soon after and I was again considered the leading player of that time.

To me, chess is the gymnasium of the mind. If you want to play it, then make it your passion.

The game below shows my most famous game. It was considered so beautiful it was named the Immortal game! 

If you would like to know more about me check out this page. 

If you would like to know more about  Paul Morphy you can click here.