Loser's POV: Amos Burn (1886-1889)

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 general that Zukertort won the vote (discussed here), given that he played in a World Championship match and Burn did not. The German is thus our first semifinalist, while his fallen antagonist gets our attention today.

Amos Burn was born on 31 December 1848 in Kingston-upon-Hull, East Yorkshire, England. He was only 13 when he was sent to Liverpool—on the opposing coast—to live with his older brother, Richard, who had established a business there. The Burns were a family of merchants, and Amos was apprenticed to a firm of merchants and ship owners. He reportedly learned chess at around 16, and was introduced to the Liverpool Chess Club at 18, a club with which he was affiliated for decades to come. 

One problem with trying to write somewhat concisely about Burn is that his career is broken up into many chunks, with long periods of relative inactivity between them. I'll summarize as best as I can, but this is hopefully the only time in the series that I'll just recommend you buy a book: Richard Forster's Amos Burn, A Chess Biography is easily the most detailed biography I own, and I hope to finish reading it all once I'm done with this series.

Forster himself described teenage Burn's position favourably: "Burn's future as a businessman was thus settled early on. Unlike many other famous chess-players he was never presented with the opportunity or the temptation to pursue an academic career. For the next 50 years his life remained very closely connected with Liverpool. With its major port and its old and strong chess club, it made a perfect base for an aspiring young merchant and chess-player."

Visiting London for the first time in 1870, Burn received chess lessons from none other than Wilhelm Steinitz, whose influence helped shape Burn into the positional master he would later become. Success came early, with Burn tying for first at his first major tournament (the 3rd BCA Challenge Cup; read a bit about those here), though he lost the playoff. Still, not too shabby.

His real accomplishments during this decade were in the tournaments of the Counties' Chess Association (CCA), the organization dedicated to chess in the provinces (read: everywhere except London). During the years 1873-1876, he was the CCA champion three out of four times, with some very impressive margins:

The eccentricity of the crosstable formats will never cease to boggle my mind—the players are sorted neither by result nor by alphabetical order, but by some mysterious third thing. Anyway, it was clear that Burn was far and away the strongest player in the association, and the press all thought he'd fit right in with the chess-playing elite in London. That would have to wait, as the Cheltenham tournament was the last before his first big break.

Between 1877 and 1885, Burn played very little chess outside of the Liverpool club. The only real exception was the 1883 CCA congress, again in Birmingham, where he finished fourth (second in "Section B," again behind Bernhard Fisher, then a loss to a William Cook in the consolation playoff). He spent a lot of these years focused on business, with excursions to America to study the sugar trade in addition to his endeavors in Liverpool. He apparently made a small fortune as an oil merchant, giving him the financial independence necessary to pursue chess exclusively for the next few years.

This is normally the part where I'd recount the player's successes, but we've already gone over them thoroughly (check my previous post, or any of the tournaments after 1886). I would then go into a more technical analysis, but I've already done that as well, in Burn's first-round match post (see here). Part of the reason why this post took so long, aside from me spending most of my time studying, is that I had no idea what I was actually going to do for this part.

I ultimately decided to focus on the following paragraph at the bottom of The Chess-Monthly's mini biography of Burn, from where the above picture is taken:

For a player who is so closely associated with "modern" (read: un-Romantic, boring) chess, he really did have an absurdly low draw rate. For example, at the Frankfurt 1887 tournament, out of 20 games, Burn scored only one draw. I want you to take a look at it, since even among draws, it's a richly combative game.

I should add a disclaimer that this trend mostly stopped in 1889, when Burn became a more orthodoxically modern player who drew a reasonable amount (at Breslau 1889, he made nine draws in 17 games, for example). Focusing on the games prior to that, I've done what all good biographers do and determined three main factors that shaped Burn's play and results. Let's do this thing.

1. Parry and Riposte

The boring answer that could sum up this entire chapter is that Burn positionally outplayed most of his opponents, and he had a strong tactical eye that would punish most missteps. This was most prominent in his White games playing Zukertort's setup, where he, like its namesake back in 1883, would simply push Queenside pawns and the opponent's position would collapse. Players learned how important central and Kingside activity was in countering this plan, and games in this dynamic were consistently interesting.

Burn was widely regarded as a world-class defender, but his style seemed distinct (to me, at least) from that of this period's other defence master, Louis Paulsen. While Paulsen's specialty was finding surprise resources that frustrated the most inevitable-looking sieges, Burn's focus was more on defending for just long enough that he could advance his own win condition, turning the attack around entirely. This was an inherently high-variance approach that wasn't always successful, but it scored some wins that left an impression.

2. Tactics in Quiet Positions

I think that these historical authors and commentators use "combinations" (which we would call tactics) to refer to Romantic operations, meaning line-clearing sacrifices and King hunts that couldn't be fully calculated. In that respect, Burn indeed did not combine all that often. The Modern school still required its' followers to have good tactical vision, or else how would they take advantage of their superior position? These tactics, however, were basically never given as much praise, though Burn's "sacrifices" came pretty close.

3. Endgame Mismanagement

At the end of my first technical analysis about Burn, I concluded that he was a much worse endgame player than you would expect such an esteemed member of the Modern school to be. Having given his endgames a closer look, I would like to chalk that up to his usual desire to play every game to the very end, which isn't always the best strategy in endgames. He lost a handful of very equal endgames to decidedly worse players by pushing too hard, and to balance out the very high number of Burn wins we've seen, I think we can take a look at a few examples.

Conclusion

Hopefully you all enjoyed this (second) foray into this very esteemed player, and are all looking forward to the next matches as much as I'm looking forward to writing about them. To close us out, I'd like to showcase a couple decidedly combinational games from Burn, purely for entertainment.

Thanks for reading, see you all again soon.