Dadian's opponent in the first game was Prince Vasil Machabeli, Giorgi Machabeli's father. He was a lawyer and he hosted that 1880 tournament in his residence in St. Petersburg. I have 8 games between Machabeli and Dadiani in my collection. The picture above depicts Vasil Machabeli (right) and famous Georgian writer Ilia Chavchavadze playing chess. (St. Petersburg, 1873)

Also, Grigol Dadian you have mentioned above was Andria's uncle. He was a poet and general of the Russian army.  

I recently came across some material about Ucha Dadian (1875-1932), Andria's cousin. He worked with Giorgi Machabeli in New-York until 1932 and he has reportedly taken part in some chess tournaments in USA. I would be delighted if you had any information concerning him.

P.S. Pouchkine's surname is actually Bobrishchev-Pushkin. 

I guess it's the Monte Carlo incident that really bugs me. How could he rob Chigorin of the chance to compete over such minor personal issues? It's sad that he would abuse his power in that way, even if he could claim the tournament wouldn't have happened had he not put up the money. It's good to know he sponsored other events as well though.

Assuming Dadian's games were real he was a strong player and it's too bad he was unable to play in official tournaments, on account of his Princedum. I wonder if he harbored some resentment against "professional players" for that reason. That might explain why he would take particular offense in Chigorin rejecting his personal invitation to his home, as it was their only opportunity to play each other. But sometimes you just have to call someone a coward publicly and be done with it.

Jeffmon,
Thanks for your input.  Prince Dadian did seem to have  certain faults that his wealth only magnified, but he was also very talented player. . . . and he did, in fact, spend a lot of money sponsoring chess events, so much so that some people who knew him as a sponsor weren't even aware of his playing skills.  It's Dadian's uneven relationship with Chess that makes him so fascinating to me.

I don't think he was a cheater, but for him to spend his money to publish games that didn't represent his true level of play (like a win in a lost match, or a sacrificial mate against a NN) warrants some disdain from his peers. In my opinion he cared more about notoriety than the game itself. Paul Morphy was born into wealth and had advantages because of it, but he earned the respect of the chess world through seeking the greatest challenges, which in turn popularized the game and advanced chess theory, and that didn't come cheap. Prince Dadian had the means to impact the game in one form or another; if he didn't have the talent of a Morphy, he could've sponsored a rising NN rather than publishing a win against him. That would've been truly noble.

Thanks very much Batgirl for your blog. I really enjoy it.

I agree wholeheartedly. Also, Dadian did have some princely pride and arrogance that angered some and in the least put off many other people.  After the Tchigorin incident in Monte Carlo, Dadian polarized everyone who kept up with the happenings in the chess world-  most of them against him (although he did have some people in his camp).

I think that at least partly, those allegiations of Prince Dadian staging games comes from the fact that he, being a wealthy and influential man, could publish his games against anyone he wished. There was some 100 years before the advent of Internet and PGN, so to get your games published, you either had to be a well-known maestro and take part in a major tournament... or to have money to spend on publishing. So it could be jealousy.

An interesting gossipy insinuation was give by  N. I. Grekov in his 1949 book on "M. I. Chigorin."  He gave  M.S. Evenson's account of meeting Tchigorin at Kiev in 1903.  During that account, Evenson mentions:
" I do not consider it superfluous to give one episode, which occurred several days before the dinner at Plater’s. I went to the club prior to the beginning of the next round and, having passed through the buffet of the club, I saw Tschigorin in a corner behind a small table and bent toward him and speaking of something in lively undertones was one of the participants in the tournament, NN. Suddenly M. I. jumped up and almost yelled:
     -'So then, tell your Maecenas , not to send such offers to Tschigorin.' "

Evenson, apparently  of the school of thought that Dadian was a faker, added the footnote:
" In order to make this small episode intelligible, it is necessary to explain that the Maecenas who is spoken of here is 'His Highness the Prince' Dadian of Mingrelia, who sold his 'ancestral land' of Mingrelia to the Tsar for a lump sum and a lifetime pension of 12,000 rubles, he coveted the glory of the great chess players by preserving many dozens of games, won by him from or drawn with very important European and Russian chess players. He never lost at all (according to him). I had been told then, and earlier, that very many of these games had simply been “bought”. NN played for Dadian, obviously, the role of an adjutant, who had ventured, apparently to make some dirty proposal to M. I. Tschigorin and received the proper rebuff, which explains M.I.’s  last sentence. It should be added that Dadian of Mingrelia, who had made himself into a chess Maecenas, in reality he limited his bounties to fattening up corrupt chessplayers like NN, but when Plater attempted to obtain from him even a comparatively small sum as a donation to the tournament, he encountered a flat refusal. - M. E.
(The incident described is of considerable interest, since protagonist is the same "His Highness” Prince Dadian of Mingrelia, who gained for himself notoriety by causing the greatest indignation of all chess world by his disgraceful actions against Tschigorin at the international tournament at Monte Carlo in the beginning of 1902(sic) -N.G.)"

Grekov was young during Dadian's life.  Moisei Samoilovich Evenson, the father of Grekov's contemporary, Alexander Evenson, was a contemporary of Dadian's.

As for Dadian's lack of suport for the Russian championship in 1903, the BCM in April 1903 wrote: "Prince Dadian of Mingrelia asks us to announce that he is not taking part in the match Kiev vs. St.Petersburg, and that he has no knowledge of the locale of the Kiev Club."  This seems to indicate that the falling out with the members of the club whom Dadian challenged to a duel in 1902 according to Duz-Chotimirsky, was still in effect.

The BCM in Dec. 1903 wrote: "Prince Dadian of Mingrelia , who lives at Kieff, but is not a member of the local club, did not give any prize in the recent tournament, but he gave a grand banquet, with music, to several chess masters at his house, and also organized consultation games with important prizes."

The selling of "his ancestral land" that Evenson refers to with obvious condemnation, happened when Andrei Dadian was 17 and Andrei had nothing to do with it.

Also, the 1903 tournament has a monetary surplus. The expenses were £214 and the operating fund was £230.

Thanks. 
That's what I mean by gossip that seems to have been ongoing.  An occasional remark but nothing substantial. So you remember that a big story at the time was the falsification of a game in the 1903 Russian Championship in Kiev by co-conspirators Vladimir Yurevich and Sergey Lebedev which Tchigorin exposed publicly in his Novoe Vremya column?  Nothing of the sort ever happened with Prince Dadian, either during his lifetime or after. It seems to me that people felt because Prince Dadian was rich, and because he didn't play in major tournaments, and because many of his "brilliancies" were against relatively unknown players (particularly unknown in the West) and because so many of his games were published, that he had to be doing something underhand. Other than this wanting to believe such things, there seems to be not a shred of evidence to support that belief.

I'd seen Machabelli spelled Machabeli, but was never able to attach any first name that had chess connections.  Thanks for the name.

In Janowski's biography, there is one insinuation (and non-Soviet, for that matter) on staging games, quoted from a Czech magazine Sport a Hry, February 1903 issue.

"Chigorin traveled from Petersburg to face something incredible: his compatriot, Prince Dadian of Mingrel, the infamous falsifier of "brilliant" games against unknown opponents, who thought of himself as a chess patron by virtue of donating several hundred francs, threatened to resign as the head of the tournament committee if Chigorin was to play - according to rumours, Chigorin offended him once. The tournament managers, more concerned with the playing house's interest than with chess, excluded Chigorin from the tournament.

It seems that those who protested against the Monte Carlo tournaments were right - chess has become a slave to the roulette."

Janowski also didn't take part in the Monte Carlo 1903 due to a conflict with Arnous de Riviere, but that's another story.

P.S. Janowski once met Prince Dadian in Kiev, in 1900. "They had a long discussion about chess, but haven't played a single game."

There was a Georgian chess player named Vaso Machabeli in the 19th century. Probably the same one who played Prince Dadian.

A player with surname Machabeli also took part in a Georgian tournament in 1893. I don't know if this was Vaso Machabeli or the Machabeli who played Dadian (if these are two different people).

Interesting games!

Thanks for the Prince Dadian backstory!  That's really fascinating.

Eternal_Patzer,

There seems to be absolutely no, or rather I've not uncovered any, indications, insinuations or accusations that Prince Dadian ever staged a game, paid anyone to lose or any of the other nonsense ascribed to him during his time or even in any reasonable time after his death.  However, there seems to have been some gossip to that effect in the Soviet Union because after Tengiz Georgadze published an article in the mid 1950s praising Prince Dadian, he was severely criticized for his effort.  In 1962 Vasily Panov wrote an article called "Attention! Prince!" in which he made such unfounded accusations. Despite the fact that Peter Romanovsky, the early chess player and historian supported Georgadze, Panov's article seemed to develop a life of it's own.  Georgadze later (1972) wrote a book about  Prince Dadian called "Play Andrei Dadian."  The bok was better received than his earlier article, but never countered Panov's accusations.

The unfounded accusations really seem to stem from some very real, but not so damning, accusations and events. 

Prince Dadian had his little spat with Tschigorin which had two causes. 1. Tschigorin had taken one of Prince Dadian's "brilliancies" which had some holes in it and annotated the game in Novoe Vremya, demonstrating the Prince's mistakes. 2. When Tschigorin arrived in Kiev for the  tournament in 1902, there was some friction between Prince Dadian and a member(s) of the chess circle there.  Dadian had challenged one of the members to a duel. Not wanting to get in the middle of this, and since Dadian was also still mad at Tschigorin for his article, Tschigorin declined to visit the Prince, an affront Dadian never forgave.

The duel incident above was related by Duz-Chotimirsky who, in his youth, knew Dadian and played with him frequently at that time.  But Duz-Chotimirsky was also biased against Prince Dadian since, as he wrote later (and I cover in more detail in a different part of this series) how he played a match with the Prince, and won by a wide margin, but Dadian sent for publication one of his own wins while failing to mention Duz-Chotimirsky's dominance in the match and failing to send in any of Duz-Chotimirsky's wins.  Duz-Chotimirsky did, then, urged by friends, send in one of his own wins, incurring the Prince's displeasure.

Prince Dadian had some faults, but there seems to be no proof, or any reason to even suspect him, of fabrication or any other gross misbehavior.  There does seem to be every reason to believe otherwise. 

Nowadays, people just simply go with the really insipid but accepted idea that Dadian was less than his games indicate out of either laziness or wanting to believe such exploitative nonsense because it sounds good. 

Wow, this game are really nice! :)

@Batgirl - You have probably written about this somewhere, but where do you come down on the longtime speculation that Prince Dadian's best games were either staged performances or compositions?  Does he just get a bad rap from the Chigoran fans et al?