Edward Lasker v Thomas, London 1912: the king hunt

Edward Lasker played this game in London in 1912 against George Thomas, later Sir George Thomas. It was an offhand game played with a clock. White sacrifices his queen on move 11, and Black's king is driven from g8 all the way down the board to g1, where a king move gives mate.

The whole game

What Stockfish makes of it

We had Stockfish check every move.

9.Bd3 and 9...Bb7: a chance missed

Lasker's 9.Bd3 was an inaccuracy: Stockfish prefers 9.Qg4, and after 9.Bd3 it rates Black about a pawn better with 9...Bxe5, which goes on to win a pawn. Thomas played 9...Bb7 instead, and the game was about level again.

10...Qe7: the losing move

After 10.Qh5, taking the knight with 10...Bxe5 would have kept the game level, according to Stockfish. The game's annotations on Wikipedia say 10...Bxe5 would have won Black a pawn; Edward Lasker himself wrote that a Berlin amateur would probably have told him he was lucky, and that 10...Bxe5 would have lost for him. Stockfish sides with neither: it calls the position equal after 10...Bxe5. 10...Qe7 allows a forced mate.

The king hunt

11.Qxh7+ gives up the queen to drag the king out, and every move from there is a check until the last. After 12.Nxf6+ the king can't go back to h8, because 13.Ng6 would be mate. The finish is a king move, 18.Kd2#: the king steps aside and the rook on a1 gives mate along the first rank.

Lasker had faster mates. 16.O-O, or 16.Kf1, threatening 17.Nh2#, mates a move sooner, and on move 18 castling queenside, 18.O-O-O#, is also mate. Stockfish confirms 16.O-O as the quickest.

After the game

Lasker had not yet learned English. A spectator translated Thomas's remark after the game, "This was very nice," and Lasker was touched by it.

How we checked

• The moves are from Wikipedia's page on Edward Lasker, which gives the score as recorded at the time of play; other versions exist, including one Lasker supplied to Chess Life in 1962. We replayed every move with python-chess: all are legal and the game ends in checkmate.
• The engine: Stockfish 16.1 checked every move at depth 22, and the key moments again at depth 26. "A pawn better" is Stockfish's measure of the position, not a count of material.
• The history and the named opinions are from the same Wikipedia page, which also notes some uncertainty over the year.

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• Rotlewi v Rubinstein, Łódź 1907
• Levitsky v Marshall, Breslau 1912
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• Capablanca v Marshall, New York 1918
• Adams v Torre, 1920
• The Immortal Zugzwang Game
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• Karpov v Spassky, 1974, game 9
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• Karpov v Kasparov, 1985, game 16
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• Kasparov's Immortal
• Kasparov v Kramnik, 2000, game 3
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• Anand's Immortal
• Anand v Carlsen, Chennai 2013, game 9
• Wei Yi v Bruzón, Danzhou 2015
• Carlsen v Karjakin, 2016, tiebreak game 4
• Carlsen v Nepomniachtchi, 2021, game 6

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