The 1st Positional Chess Masterpiece - Best Of The pre-1900s - St. Amant vs Staunton, 1843
Positional chess as a concept was a latecomer to the game. One can find documented combinations and miniatures dating back 1,000 years. Attacking play and ideas have existed for more than a millenium. Positional play, in some senses, finds it's origin in the teachings of Wilhelm Steinitz, barely more than 100 years ago. Certainly all of the great masters have intuitively understood many positional concepts, and one finds great positional play in the games of Andre Philidor, Paul Morphy, and even someone perceived as full-throated attacker like Adolf Anderssen, but most games featured fragments of positional play, not a cohesive victory built around positional ideas.
When was the first time a player was able to win a really beautiful game BECAUSE of fine positional play? To my mind, the following gem by the great English player Howard Staunton against the Frenchman Pierre Saint Amant is the earliest game I've seen that can be considered something of a positional masterpiece. Staunton, the first English player to best a top French player, uses an excellent exchange sacrifice in the mode of Selezniev vs. Alekhine to secure an amazing bishop pair, d5 knight outpost, protected passed pawn, and various weaknesses in the opponent's camp.
Given the age of the game, one wonders how Staunton even understood the exchange sacrifice. After all, the established values of five points for the rook and three for the bishop were not so established at the time. However Staunton understood his own play at the time, the engine appreciates it now, certifying the exchange sacrifice and many of Staunton's later moves as excellent and purposeful exploitations of the advantages accrued in his position.
Top 10 Games from before 1900
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- #11: Saint Amant vs. Staunton, 1843
- #12: Chigorin vs. Steinitz, 1892
- #13: Fleissig vs. Schlecter, 1893
- #14: Konyovits vs. Charousek, 1893
- #15: Weiss vs. Pollock, 1889
- See also: Top 10 of the 1900s, Top 10 of the 1910s, Top 10 of the 1920s, Top 10 of the 1930s, Top 10 of the 1940s, Top 10 of the 1950s, Top 10 of the 1960s, Top 10 of the 1970s, Top 10 of the 1980s, Top 10 of the 1990s, Top 10 of the 2000s, and Top 10 of the 2010s
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I'm the VP of Chess and Community for Chess.com. I earned the National Master title in 2012, and in 2014, I returned to my home state of South Carolina to start Strategery: Chess and Games. In late 2014, I began working for Chess.com and haven't looked back since.
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