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Today's classic: the Evergreen Game

Replay the game move by move · The chapter book for ages 9 to 14, on Spark & Anvil

A year after the Immortal Game, Adolf Anderssen sat down in Berlin to a friendly game against Jean Dufresne, a strong player and a writer of chess books. Twenty-four moves later he had produced a finish that players still set out on their boards for pleasure: a rook given with check, a queen given with check, and three bishop moves, every one of them check, ending in mate.

Long after Anderssen's death, Wilhelm Steinitz wrote that one of its moves was "an evergreen in the laurel crown of the departed chess hero". The Evergreen Game has had its name ever since.

Who was playing

Anderssen, by then famous after winning in London the year before, still earned his living as a schoolteacher in Breslau. Chess was something he did very well in his spare time. Dufresne was a Berlin player who wrote popular books about the game. He was a good player, not a great one. This one is the reason anybody outside a small circle of chess historians knows his name.

It is worth remembering what a casual game was like then. No clocks, often. Friends, a board, a café or a front room. Players might take as long as they liked over a move, or play fast and chatter. Nobody was writing a book. Somebody wrote the moves down because they turned out to be extraordinary, and it is a small piece of luck that they did. Many games as good as this one must have been played in front rooms and cafés and never recorded at all.

The game in four movements

The gift. Anderssen opens with the Evans Gambit, giving a pawn on the fourth move to gain time. He castles. Black never does.

The long middle. For a dozen moves the game is quiet on the surface. White brings out every piece. Black's queen moves again and again, while Black's king stays in the middle of the board, surrounded by pieces that are each doing two jobs.

The breach. A knight leaps into Black's position with check and a threat to the queen, and is taken; the pawns in front of Black's king are broken. Then the last white rook comes quietly to the centre. That is the evergreen move. It ignores Black's chances entirely.

The chain. Black takes a knight and threatens mate. White answers with five checks in a row, never giving Black a moment to carry out the threat, and mates.

What is known, disputed and legendary

• Known. The players, the city and the year, and the moves up to Black's nineteenth.
• Disputed. The last four moves were not printed at first. The original publication said only that White mates in four, which was a normal way to record a game then. The mate everyone plays is the obvious forced one. And the famous verdict that Black was lost whatever he did was overturned by later analysts, who found defences at move nineteen that might have held.
• Legend. That this was a carefully planned masterpiece. It may have been dashed off in a friendly game. That makes it more remarkable, not less, and rather more encouraging for the rest of us.

Why it is still taught

The Evergreen Game is the standard example of a forcing combination: a sequence where every move leaves the opponent only a narrow choice, so the whole thing can be calculated in advance. Teachers use it to show a principle that is easy to say and hard to practise. When your opponent is threatening something terrible, you may only play moves that force a reply. Every check buys a move. If the checks run out before the mate arrives, you lose.

It also teaches a gentler lesson about seeing ahead. Almost anybody can see the first sacrifice. The skill is in seeing the last move before playing the first. Children who learn to do this on a chessboard sometimes start doing it elsewhere, in a game of draughts, a card game, or a plan for a Saturday, and it is worth noticing when they do.

And it teaches humility, through its history. The game was admired for decades by people who knew far more chess than most of us ever will, and they were wrong about one important thing. For decades, writers repeated that Black had no defence. Then somebody looked again, harder, and found one. A famous verdict is not the same thing as a checked one.

A note on announcing mate

The first printing's "White mates in four" deserves a moment. It tells us something about what players valued. A forced mate, once seen, was regarded as finished; playing it out was a formality, and sometimes a slightly rude one. The skill was in seeing it, and announcing it was a way of showing that you had.

Children enjoy this idea a great deal. "Mate in four" is a claim, and a claim can be checked. If your child announces a mate and then plays it, they have done something more than win: they have made a prediction and shown that it was true. If it turns out not to be a mate, that is just as useful, because now you can look together for the reply they missed.

The question for the table

If you play through the game with a child, stop after Black's nineteenth move, when Black is threatening mate. Ask: "What kind of move does White have to play now?" Let them discover that only checks are safe. Then ask them to find the checks, one at a time.

Your child may have just read the same game as The Evergreen Game at the Slow Lake Academy, where Inkling, the prompter, works out the whole finish at the kitchen table before calling a single name, and then announces the mate in four to the village before it is played, just as the first printing did.

Why "evergreen" fits

Steinitz's word was a compliment to a dead friend and rival, and it was also accurate. Most famous old games feel old. Their openings have been refuted, their defences look naive, their attacks would bounce off a modern player. The Evergreen Game still feels fresh because its finish depends on nothing that has gone out of date. A king in the middle of the board, defended by pieces that are each doing two jobs, against an opponent with every piece in play and a forcing line to the end: that position could arise in a school club this afternoon. The fashions in openings have changed many times since 1852, and the books that recommend them have come and gone. The geometry of a double check has not.

Something to do

Play the last five moves with the child taking White. Before White's first move, ask them to say all five aloud. If they can, they have seen the end before the beginning, which is the whole point. If they can't, play them one at a time and count the legal replies Black has after each. Watching the choices shrink to almost nothing is the best explanation of why a forcing line can be calculated at all. Then, if you have the patience, go back one move and let the child try to defend as Black. Finding no defence is frustrating. Being told that later players found one is very satisfying, and it is the best possible introduction to the idea that experts can be wrong.

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