The Immortal Game: Anderssen's Sacrifices That Defined Chess Beauty

The Immortal Game is a casual game played between rounds of the 1851 London International Chess Tournament. Adolf Anderssen sacrificed both rooks, a bishop, and then his queen, and still won on move 23. Howard Staunton published it in The Chess Player’s Chronicle the same year. Ernst Falkbeer called it “the immortal game” in the German chess magazine Deutsches Schachzeitung in 1855, and the name stuck.

It’s been analyzed continuously ever since. Not because the play is flawless by modern engine standards, computers find improvements for both sides, but because the sacrifices are motivated by a forced idea that Anderssen calculated completely over the board in 1851 without any modern tools.

The game

The opening is a King’s Gambit Accepted. White offers the f-pawn on move 2; Black takes it; White develops aggressively toward Black’s exposed king.

Kieseritzky plays 3…Qh4+, the Kieseritzky Gambit line, which forces White’s king to f1 immediately. What follows is 20 moves of Anderssen finding threatening squares and Kieseritzky accumulating material while falling steadily further behind in development.

The complete game score, public domain (played 1851):

1. e4  e5     2. f4  exf4   3. Bc4 Qh4+
4. Kf1 b5     5. Bxb5 Nf6   6. Nf3 Qh6
7. d3  Nh5    8. Nh4 Qg5    9. Nf5 c6
10. g4 Nf6   11. Rg1 cxb5  12. h4  Qg6
13. h5 Qg5   14. Qf3 Ng8   15. Bxf4 Qf6
16. Nc3 Bc5  17. Nd5 Qxb2  18. Bd6 Bxg1
19. e5  Qxa1+ 20. Ke2 Na6  21. Nxg7+ Kd8
22. Qf6+!! Nxf6 23. Be7#

This game score is drawn from standard historical databases. The moves are public domain. The game was played in 1851.

Why the sacrifices work

By move 11, Anderssen has left his h1 rook hanging. Kieseritzky plays 11…cxb5 cautiously, declining it, which turns out to be a mistake of a different kind. The position is already uncomfortable for Black because the development lag is severe.

The queen sacrifice on move 22 is the culmination of a forced sequence. By that point Kieseritzky’s king is on d8, his pieces are scattered, and Anderssen has Be7 available. The check 22.Qf6+ strips the knight on f6, which was the last piece preventing Be7, and mate follows on the next move regardless of what Black does.

What makes this a brilliancy and not a blunder is that Anderssen could see that conclusion before giving up the rooks. The material sacrifices aren’t speculative. They’re the setup for a mate calculated in full in advance.

Why this game still matters

Two reasons. First, it was played in 1851. No engines, no databases, no prepared lines. The calculation was entirely over the board, in a casual game, between rounds of a tournament Anderssen was also winning.

Second, it’s one of the clearest illustrations of a principle that took decades to formally articulate: king safety and development can be worth more than material. Kieseritzky had two extra rooks. His king had no safe squares. Material evaluations that ignore king exposure were insufficient then and they’re insufficient now. The players who understand this principle (Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov, and every strong attacking player since) build on the logical foundation that Anderssen demonstrated here.

The historical context

The London 1851 tournament was organized by Howard Staunton, the dominant English player of the era. Anderssen won it, beating Staunton in the final, and the tournament established the basic competitive chess format that lasted through the 19th century.

The game against Kieseritzky was played informally during the tournament, not as part of the official competition. Kieseritzky was a French player and chess teacher who had developed the variation bearing his name. He sent the game score to a Parisian chess magazine, which is how it was preserved. He apparently didn’t think he had played badly. He did have the material advantage, after all.

The Evergreen Game (Anderssen vs. Dufresne, 1852) is sometimes called its companion piece. Between them, the two games established Anderssen’s reputation as the dominant attacking genius of the pre-Steinitz era. For more context on the games that shaped chess history, see the Magnus Carlsen biography and our chess improvement guide for how these tactical patterns translate to modern club play. The sacrificial themes in the Immortal Game (removing the defender, exploiting a trapped king) appear in Logical Chess: Move by Move (Amazon, affiliate), which annotates games precisely to show this kind of reasoning at work.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Immortal Game in chess? The Immortal Game is a game played by Adolf Anderssen (White) against Lionel Kieseritzky (Black) in London in 1851. Anderssen sacrificed both rooks, a bishop, and his queen, winning anyway on move 23. It is considered the most celebrated sacrificial game in chess history.

Who played the Immortal Game? Adolf Anderssen, a German chess master and winner of the 1851 London International Chess Tournament, played the White pieces. Lionel Kieseritzky, a French player and teacher, played Black.

When and where was the Immortal Game played? June 1851 during the London International Chess Tournament, as a casual game between rounds: not as part of the official competition.

Why is it called the Immortal Game? Ernst Falkbeer coined the term in an 1855 article in the Deutsches Schachzeitung, a German chess journal. The name reflects the game’s astonishing combination, which has been studied and published continuously ever since.

Sources

• Staunton, Howard. The Chess Player’s Chronicle, 1851. (First publication of the game score.)
• Falkbeer, Ernst. Deutsches Schachzeitung, 1855. (First documented use of “the immortal game.”)
• Hooper, David, and Kenneth Whyld. The Oxford Companion to Chess. Oxford University Press, 1992.