From: "World Chess Championship", INTERNET:newsletter@mark-weeks.com Date: 00/08/01, 14:38 Re: Chess History on the Web (2000 no.15) The next review, our last following the Chess History bookmarks, is for 'Schach-Ereignisse' by Erhard Frolik. The site is at address... http://www.reutlingen.netsurf.de/%7efrolik/index.htm ...and is written in the German language. Once again I resorted to the translation services at translator.go.com to understand the foreign language material. Go translates Frolik's home page greeting as 'Cordially welcomely with "chess events" of Erhard Frolik! The largest chess events from all times! The entire panorama of the world chess from 1858 to today!'. As usual, the translation is far from perfect, but it does give us a good idea about the content of the site. Frolik is the chess guide for www.meome.de, a German language site similar to the English language About.com. The main 'Schach' pages are under... http://www.meome.de/app/de/portal_bookmark.jsp/43139.html ...and are well worth a look even if you don't read German. Here we find a link to Frolik's biography and, among many other topics, [Die Großen des Schachs], which has links to biographies about past and present chess grandmasters. Several of the links point back to Frolik's own pages, although the first is to [Weltmeister], another excellent German language site dedicated to the lives of the world champions. Returning to Frolik's Ereignisse site, the chess history sections are under the links [Turnierindex] & [Weltmeister]. Unfortunately, the main page is somewhat slow to load. This is because of two big graphic images -- animated GIFs for rotating buttons -- which weigh in at over 100.000 bytes each. [Turnierindex] lists 55 tournaments. Each event has links to download the games in PGN & ChessBase 6.0 format. The first event is the match Morphy - Anderssen (1858) and the last is a Linares tournament (1999) won by Kasparov. Half of the 55 tournaments are clustered in the years 1997-1998, and there are big gaps in the list. Between St. Petersburg (1909) and 'Kasparov against Argentina' (1992,) only Zurich (1953) is listed. [Weltmeister] has some nice drawings & photos of the world champions, as well as biographies of Morphy, Anderssen, Steinitz, Lasker, Karpov, & Kasparov. The biographies link to referenced tournaments and to a few biographies of other great players who never became world champion. The directory... http://www.reutlingen.netsurf.de/%7efrolik/Spieler/ ...is open and makes it easy to see which players have biographies on the site. I have a few minor nitpicks with the list of [Weltmeister] champions. There is an error in the date for the end of Fischer's reign and the beginning of Karpov's. The date shown is 1974, although FIDE granted the title to that Karpov in 1975. Kasparov is listed twice -- the first time for 1985-1993 and the second time as 'PCA 1993 bis heute' (PCA 1993 until today), although the PCA disappeared from public view in 1996. Since this is a German language site, I decided to take a closer look at the material covering Adolf Anderssen, the great German player of the mid-19th century. His Ereignisse biography states that he was the 'Weltbester Spieler von 1851-1857 und 1860-1866' ('the best player in the world' over the dates shown), a 15 year span interrupted by Paul Morphy. When I looked at the page covering the Morphy - Anderssen match (1858) in Paris, I was puzzled to see the score listed as '13 : 4 für Morphy'. My own page on the event gives the final score as 8-3 for Morphy and other references that I checked agree with my summary. Frolik's crosstable matched mine for the first 11 games, but added an additional '1 1 1 1 0 1' for Morphy. Edward Winter's 1981 book 'World Chess Champions', the single best reference I have on the subject, solved the mystery in its chapter on Morphy. 'The day after the match ended the two masters played six offhand games; Morphy won five, Anderssen one.' Anderssen - Steinitz (1866), the next event in Frolik's list, matches other sources. I asked Surfwax, my favorite search engine at www.surfwax.com, to search the Web on 'Adolf Anderssen'. As we've already seen on similar searches, the results return Web pages written in many languages, thereby showing the global interest in chess and its history. The page http://members.tripod.com/rajncajn/andersen.htm summarizes Anderssen's life in a one paragraph biography of little known facts... 'Strongest player in the world between 1859 and 1866. When he died, his obituary was 19 pages long. In 1851 A. Anderssen was recognized as the strongest chess player in the world. That same year A. Anderson was recognized as the strongest checker player in the world. In 1877 a group of German chess fans organized a tournament to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Anderssen's learning the chess moves. This is the only tournament in chess history organized to commemorate a competitor. He tied for second, behind Paulsen.' ...It links to http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/andersse.htm, which repeats the same facts among many others. Of the match with Morphy, the page says... 'On December 25, 1858 [Anderssen] went to Paris to play Paul Morphy. He lost the match of 11 games (he won 2, drew 2, lost 7) in 9 days. Anderssen had not played chess for 6 years and travelled to Paris on his vacation time, even though it had been stipulated earlier that the match was to be held in Breslau. The first game of the Morphy-Anderssen match began on April 12, 1859, at the Hotel Breuteuil in Paris.' ...but offers no further links. The title of the page, 'Bill Wall's Chess Master Profiles' identifies the well known Web author. Going back To Surfwax, I tried... http://www.smartchess.com/smartchessonline/SmartChessOnline/Mar99/caissa01.htm ...and saw 'Caissa's Warriors by Steve Lopez' flash on the screen to be quickly replaced by an 'Execute Access Forbidden' error message. I was more successful with the one page summary offered by the Encyclopedia Britannica site... http://www.britannica.com/seo/a/adolf-anderssen/ 'Anderssen, Adolf b. July 6, 1818, Breslau, Prussia d. March 13, 1879, Breslau Chess master considered the world's strongest player from his victory in the first modern international tournament (London, 1851) until his defeat (1858) by Paul Morphy in match play and, again, after Morphy's retirement (c. 1861) until his defeat by Wilhelm Steinitz (1866). Anderssen was noted for his ability to discover combination plays calculated to force an immediate decision. One of his famous games was dubbed "the Immortal Game." Anderssen studied mathematics and philosophy and taught mathematics and German at the Friedrichs Gymnasium in Breslau.' ...where the dates of Anderssen's supremacy almost match Frolik's. The last page I looked at... http://www.istal.com/chess/ANDERSS.HTM ...by Jay Ter Louw of the Tallahassee Chess Club, appears to be an English version of Frolik's page. Indeed, Go translates a paragraph of Frolik as... 'It graduated at the university and became a teacher (mathematics professor). It remained unmarried, in order for his nut/mother and one likewise unverheiratetet for sister to ensure. As it 30 years was old its chess career had not even begun.' ...where Ter Louw has... 'He graduated from the university and became a teacher, remaining unmarried to care for his mother and a spinster sister. His chess career did not even begin until he reached age thirty.' ...I'm not sure what the phrase 'nut/mother' means, but it certainly underscores the limitations in these dynamic translation services! As for the apparent plagiarism between the two versions, I'll pass, because I don't know which version came first and because the Web is full of this sort of thing. --- These little researches into Adolf Anderssen reminded me about one of my favorite passages in chess literature. It's from Dr. Emanuel Lasker's 'Manual of Chess' (p.192), and I'd like to share it here... 'Steinitz lived his youth in an age on which two great personalities, Anderssen and Morphy, had left a profound impression. At that time everybody thought that victory in Chess was gained by ingenuity alone. Often had the Chess-world seen Anderssen produce an unexpected combination as if by magic, and Morphy equally undertake a successful attack. Thereby the Chess-world had come to believe that these combinations, these formidable attacks had been created out of nothing by sudden, inexplicable intuitions. 'I fancy that one day [Steinitz] reflected how it could have come about that the magician Morphy beat the magician Anderssen. That there should be *one* magician is quite natural, but it is really absurd to think that there should be two magicians fighting each other. That a magician wins is obvious, but how can a magician lose? [...] Steinitz, by slow degrees, was led to believe that Chess, after all, must be subject to a reason of its own not to be affected by invention, intuition, inspiration, genius, or any thing else of the kind.' (p.196) ...Chess science arose from studying the battles between chess magicians. Steinitz, the original chess scientist, was the first player to have used & been granted the title 'World Chess Champion'. On his [Weltmeister] page, Frolik's lists 1866-1894 as Steinitz's championship reign, although the date 1866 is controversial and is not accepted by all chess historians. Only after Morphy's death in 1884 could Steinitz be universally accepted as the undisputed champion. How did the greatest of the 19th century players compare with their 20th century successors? Arpad Elo's 'The Rating of Chess Players Past and Present' (1978) offers a clue. Elo calculated the best 5-year average for historical grandmasters. For the early champions and their challengers he offered the following estimates:- 2690 Morphy 2600 Anderssen 2650 Steinitz 2600 Zukertort 2720 Lasker Other pre-ELO era players assigned a rating of 2600 or greater were:- 2690 Alekhine 2725 Capablanca 2600 Chigorin 2600 Lasa 2615 Nimzovitch 2630 Pillsbury 2600 Schlechter 2610 Tarrasch The name of Lasa, who was also a 19th century player, might be unfamiliar to you. We should be covering him in a future article in this series. Bye for now, Mark Weeks