Liu Wenzhe v Donner, 1978: the Chinese Immortal

The 1978 Olympiad in Buenos Aires was China's first, soon after the Cultural Revolution. In round 8 China played the Netherlands, and Liu Wenzhe faced the grandmaster Jan Hein Donner. Donner had mocked an Icelandic grandmaster for losing to a Chinese player earlier in the event; Jon Speelman, in his book of the best games of the decade, presents this game as the reply. Liu became the first Chinese player to beat a grandmaster and later China's first international master. FIDE calls the game the Chinese Immortal.

The whole game

The opening is a Pirc Defence. White pushes the g- and h-pawns at Black's castled king, and opens the h-file.

What Stockfish makes of it

We had Stockfish check every move.

7...O-O and 10...Ne8: castling into the attack

7...O-O, castling into White's pawn storm, is usually marked as dubious, and Stockfish agrees: 7...e6 was better. After the h-file opened, 10...Ne8 was passive and took a flight square from Black's king, as Carlos Colodro wrote for ChessBase; Stockfish prefers 10...Nh7, though Black was worse either way.

13...Be6: the losing move

After 13.Qg3 Black was in trouble, but 13...Be6 allowed a forced mate. 13...f5 would have held on longer, though Stockfish rates Black more than three pawns worse even then.

16.Qxg6+!!: the queen sacrifice

From move 15 every White move was the only one that kept the forced mate. 16.Qxg6+ gives up the queen; the bishops and the g-pawn chase Black's king, and after 20.Bxh6+ mate follows: for example 20...Kh8 21.Bxf8 Qh4 22.Rxh4#. Donner resigned.

How we checked

• The moves are from Wikipedia's pages on Liu Wenzhe and Jan Hein Donner, which agree, with moves 10 to 20 confirmed by ChessBase and the last moves by FIDE. We replayed every move with python-chess: all are legal.
• 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 Wikipedia, ChessBase (Colodro), FIDE and OlimpBase.

More famous games

• The Immortal Game
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• Capablanca v Marshall, New York 1918
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• Larsen v Spassky, Belgrade 1970
• Fischer v Spassky, 1972, game 6
• Karpov v Spassky, 1974, game 9
• Karpov v Kasparov, 1985, game 16
• Kasparov v Karpov, Seville 1987, game 24
• Shirov v Judit Polgár, Buenos Aires 1994
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• Kasparov v Kramnik, 2000, game 3
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• Carlsen v Karjakin, 2016, tiebreak game 4
• Carlsen v Nepomniachtchi, 2021, game 6

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