Sunday, May 6, 2012

Steinitz stumbles in BDG bog

It happened near the end of the 19th century, a long time ago. The great Wilhelm Steinitz, having lost his "first undisputed" world championship to Emanuel Lasker a couple of years earlier, ran afoul of a Blackmar-Diemer Gambit in a Moscow simultaneous in February 1896. Steinitz failed miserably in a return match against Lasker in Moscow later that year, and died in New York City on 12 August 1900.

This game, which purists might want to call the von Popiel attack in/or rather than the Ryder Gambit has been around the web for years, but it came up again in a note I received recently from Clyde Nakamura, who wrote that he recently retired (from work, not chess) and plans to revive his column at Chessville called The Search for Dragons & Mythical Chess Openings. That's good news for all of us fans of unorthodox openings and enterprising chess.

So here's the game: