Anand’s immortal
For chess amateurs and beginners, one of the chief and more obvious joys of the game has been in reliving the classics — Adolf Anderssen's Immortal and Evergreen games, the attacking masterpieces of Paul Morphy, Frank Marshal and Mikhail Tal, the 13-year old Bobby Fischer's Game of the Century are among the more popular. The geometry of the pieces on the board, the counter-intuitivity of multiple sacrifices, the stark elegance of the stripped down but irresistible attack have captured the imagination of several generations of chess practitioners.
The chronology of these games is instructive. Anderssen's Immortal and Evergreen games were informal affairs played in 1851 and 1852. Morphy retired from chess to devote himself to his legal practice in 1859 aged just 22. Marshal's concluding move against Stefan Levitsky so thrilled the onlookers who had gathered in the cafe in which the game was played that they showered the participants with gold coins, or so the story goes. The year was 1912. Fischer's annihilation of the former US champion Donald Byrne announced his genius to the world in 1956. Tal's most annotated game came in 1965 against Bent Larsen.
A certain degree of
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