Site review - Schach-Ereignisse
Mark Weeks
'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/caissa
01.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
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