The Evergreen Game: Anderssen v Dufresne, 1852

Adolf Anderssen, the winner of the London 1851 tournament and widely seen as the best player in the world, played this game against Jean Dufresne, a popular chess writer and a strong, though lesser, player. It was probably an informal game, usually assumed to have been played in Berlin, and it appeared in the Deutsche Schachzeitung that autumn. Its name came later: when Anderssen died in 1879, Wilhelm Steinitz wrote a tribute that called 19.Rad1 "an evergreen in the laurel crown" of the departed chess hero.

White to move and mate in four. Anderssen v Dufresne, 1852.

The whole game

The Evergreen Game: Anderssen v Dufresne, 1852. Step through all 24 moves.

The opening is the Evans Gambit, 4.b4: White gives a pawn to gain time and build a centre. Black never castles: by move 17 the king is still on e8, and White's pieces are gathering around it.

What Stockfish makes of it

This game has been analysed for more than 170 years, and the verdicts kept changing. We had Stockfish check every move. It agrees with some of the analysts and not with others, and it finds that Anderssen let a won position slip before the famous finish.

11...b5: Black was doing well

Black to move after 11.Ba3. With 11...d5, Black is better.

Stockfish rates Black better here, by more than half a pawn, with 11...d5 or castling. Matthew Sadler, a modern grandmaster who annotated the game, also judged White "somewhat worse" after 11...d5. Dufresne played 11...b5, offering a pawn to open the b-file, and after it White is better.

15...Qf5: a lost tempo

15...Qf5 loses time: the queen goes to h5 a move later anyway.

Lasker suggested 15...d2!, giving the pawn back to slow White down. Stockfish agrees it was the better move: White is still clearly better after it, by about one and a half pawns, against about four pawns after 15...Qf5.

17.Nf6+: Anderssen lets the win slip

17.Nf6+ gxf6 18.exf6 Rg8: the attack looks strong, and Black can hold.

The knight sacrifice is the start of the famous attack, and it throws away a winning position. Stockfish rates 17.Ng3 about four and a half pawns better for White; after 17.Nf6+ the position is about level. Sadler called the move objectively bad, and Paul Lipke and Graham Burgess both preferred 17.Ng3.

19.Rad1: the evergreen move

White to move after 18...Rg8. Anderssen played 19.Rad1.

The knight on f3 is attacked. Anderssen left it there and brought his last piece into play. Stockfish rates the position level after 19.Rad1. 19.Be4, which Lasker later said would have won more easily, is barely better: Stockfish also calls it close to level, as Murey and Fridshtein showed in 1975, when they found that Lasker's analysis of 19.Be4 was faulty.

19...Qxf3: the losing move

The famous finish only works because Dufresne took the knight. Stockfish finds two moves that hold the balance: 19...Bd4 and 19...Qh3. Readers of the German magazine Schach-Echo reached the same conclusion in 1958, and Zaitsev found 19...Bd4 on his own. After 19...Qxf3 White is winning by about four pawns.

20...Nxe7: mate in four

20...Nxe7 21.Qxd7+ Kxd7 22.Bf5+ Ke8 23.Bd7+ Kf8 24.Bxe7#.

After 20.Rxe7+, taking the rook allows mate in four. 20...Kd8 was the best way to go on: White should still win, by about four pawns, but it would have taken a long time. Instead 21.Qxd7+! gives up the queen, and 22.Bf5+ is a double check, so the king has to move even though both checking pieces could be taken. Savielly Tartakower called it "a combination second to none in the literature of the game".

The Deutsche Schachzeitung only said that White mates in four moves, so it isn't certain the final moves were played on the board.

How we checked

The moves are from Wikipedia's page on the game. We replayed every one 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 28. "A pawn better" is Stockfish's measure of the position, not a count of material.
The history and the named opinions (Steinitz, Lasker, Sadler, Burgess, Lipke, Murey and Fridshtein, Zaitsev, Tartakower, Schach-Echo) are from the Wikipedia article.

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