The consistency with which you lot vote for World Championship Challengers over non-Challengers continues, with Chigorin defeating Tarrasch in the most recent bout (see here). The Russian maestro is thus our last semifinalist, and since the Macken...
Happy New Year, everyone. Welcome to the first vote of 2026. We have one tiny problem: these two didn't meet in the 80s. When we encountered this problem before—in the Burn-Riemann match (see here)—we compared the players separa...
I hope everyone had a good Christmas, and this weird purgatory before New Years isn't too disorienting. Let's do some housekeeping before we get going. Gunsberg won the vote against Mackenzie (see here), however Santa has confirmed that the biog...
Mackenzie bio coming sometime closer to the New Year. I've been informed that Santa will be gifting me the recently published George Mackenzie biography by John Hilbert, which has partially influenced me to write about this match prematurely....
Let's keep the good times rolling. Going purely by seeding, Gunsberg is actually the underdog in this match, perhaps contrary to expectations. This is primarily because of his horrid result at his debut tournament, Nuremberg 1883; take that o...
The top seed has been upset! Ok, perhaps this doesn't require too much commotion; I already mentioned how I thought Burn was over-seeded, which is partially what inspired this series to begin with (everything is explained here). It makes sense in ...
Things are about to get increasingly interesting around these parts. If you think about it, we're over halfway done; we've covered eight matches and eight biographies, and there are only seven matches and eight biographies remaining. Welcome ...
Our eighth and final quarterfinalist has now been decided. For those of you who missed the previous vote (see here), Chigorin technically scored the second "upset" (using seeding as a measure) of the round of 16, moving on and letting us explore t...
Let's close out this opening round with a bang. Romantic Rumble: Mikhail Chigorin vs. Szymon Winawer The final match of the first round pits the bracket's two "Russians" (Congress Poland was part of the Russian Empire) against each other. T...
We all saw this coming, right? Google Forms Unsurprisingly, Siegbert Tarrasch won the vote offered in the previous chapter (see here), meaning we get to take a closer look at his lesser-known opponent. Johann Nepomuk Berger was born on 11...
I lost my image editing software when my Windows got corrupted, so I made this thumbnail using a Python script. Hopefully it looks alright. Romantic Rumble: Siegbert Tarrasch vs. Johann Berger I don't think anyone would necessarily feel sli...
"According to eternal, immutable laws, mortal human beings must complete the cycles of their existence. Happy, however, is the individual whom the law of his existence guides into smooth and untangled paths. For him, like that of heavenly beings, ...
Apologies for the slightly ugly bracket: Romantic Rumble: Joseph Blackburne vs. Louis Paulsen Today's matchup is the one with the most history, as these two have games spanning almost three decades; it was Paulsen's blindfold exhibitions ba...
My Windows got corrupted while I was writing this chapter, and among the things I lost were the games and misc. resources used in this blog series. This chapter is mostly unaffected, but expect an even longer gap between posts than usual while I r...
This is probably the least interesting match of the tournament. I'm going to break the sequence a little here, partially because my upcoming obligations will take up a lot of my time, partially because I really want to get this one out of the...
As expected, the winner of our previous vote (see here) was the person who played in a World Championship match, not the person who didn't. Isidor Gunsberg thus moves on to our second quarterfinal match, but today we pay tribute to his dispatched ...
This next match is probably going to be my favourite of the entire round: Romantic Rumble: Isidor Gunsberg vs. James Mason When comparing which of two things is "better," you obviously have to define what exactly you're measuring. In our ca...
My last blog was very unfortunately timed, and as a result, not many people saw it (but you can, see here). Therefore, there's probably not a lot of people who knew Schallopp was even part of the last match. The vote obviously had a smaller turnou...
My job has turned into one where I have to wait for literal hours for my code to compile, leaving me with ample time to do chess stuff. Lucky me! For those that don't know what this blog series is all about, please see here. For those that do, l...
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Zukertort won the vote given in our previous discussion (see here). Unlike with Riemann's chapter (see here), today's exploration of Max Weiss won't really be a biographical one, since details of his personal life are rathe...
We're moving on to the second match of our March Madness-esque tournament today. Check out the first match here, an explanation of what the heck we're even doing here, and most importantly, my tribute to our first eliminated competitor here (I spe...
Now accepting suggestions for a better title. As expected, Amos Burn won the vote (albeit by a smaller margin than I anticipated) given in our previous discussion (see here) and thus he moves on while we say goodbye to Fritz Riemann. Seeing as t...
In my last post (see here), we took a look at a prototype leaderboard-esque thing for the 1880s in a continuation of humanity's desire to rank things. I argued that the leaderboard had its flaws when it came to actually ranking people, but it serv...
This is quite possibly the most dry post I'll ever make. I beg you to bear with me, despite all of the seemingly useless arithmetic, I'm going somewhere important with all of this. In February of 1886, the mathematician William Sonneborn shared,...
In Winner's POV, we take a look at tournaments from the 19th century and see the games that allowed the top player to prevail. Some tournaments will be known and famous, others will be more obscure - in a time period where competition is scarce, I...
