Romantic Rumble Final: Johannes Zukertort vs. Joseph Blackburne Part 1
It all comes down to this.
While I don't agree with every single match result, I'm at least happy that these two made the final, as I also think they were the two best players of the decade (yada yada "excluding Steinitz" and so on). Zukertort came into the decade as a likely candidate for the world's best player, as he won the previous international tournament at Paris in 1878. Blackburne, meanwhile, was widely considered the best British-born player, and with England considered the top chess country at the time, that had to count for something.
The other reason why this makes for the perfect final matchup is the sheer number of games between the two. I think that the previously most populated match was back in the first round between Gunsberg and Mason (see here), which featured 13 games; Blackburne and Zukertort played at least 45 serious games throughout their career, with almost 40 of them taking place in the 80s. That's quite the rivalry, and hopefully it explains why this match will be broken up into parts.
My current plan is to devote this entry to their first match, played in 1881. Part two will cover their 1887 match, while part three will be the "traditional" chapter that covers their tournament games. Only at the end of part three, after we've consumed 30+ games between these two great rivals, will the voting actually begin. We've got a lot to cover, so let's begin.
London 1881 Match
This was arguably the most anticipated match in years. Blackburne and Zukertort were considered by many to be the two strongest players in the world (not counting Steinitz, whose inactivity period hadn't ended yet), and William Norwood Potter—a very strong player and a well-respected journalist—thought that "if Dr. Zukertort be victorious in the impending conflict, we anticipate that he will be left alone, no one disputing his chieftanship for years to come."
The match was the usual first to seven wins, draws counting zero, and each game had a time control of 30 moves in the first two hours and 15 moves per hour thereafter. Each side put up a stake of £100, equivalent to about £16,000 today. Everything else was fairly odd, with the venue switching between the St. George's Chess Club (Zukertort's home turf) and Simpson's Divan (not exactly Blackburne's stomping ground). The copyright initially belonged to the players, but Steinitz, in his articles for The Field, apparently got first dibs. While this lead to a lot of commentators giving this match little attention, it helped fuel the rivalry between Zukertort and Steinitz, as the former was enabled to routinely criticize Steinitz's annotations when The Chess-Monthly released later in the month. Suffice to say, there was plenty of entertainment on and off the board.
When the match started at the end of June, it was Zukertort who set the pace. While the first two games were drawn, he had the better side of each, and he kept up the pressure to win the next three games in a row. The degree to which he outplayed Blackburne is really not what you'd expect from two of the world's top five—as White, he got straightforward advantages and simply outmaneuvered Blackburne, while with Black, he nullified the initial attack and coerced Blackburne into a dubious sacrifice that ultimately didn't pay off. Below I show the decisive games; as we go, I'll only show the more combative draws (there were a handful of non-games that we can safely skip), but I'll include the full collection of games at the very bottom for those curious.
Blackburne's match was salvaged somewhat with a win in the sixth game. In a similar Giuoco Pianissimo as in game four, both players castled Queenside and focused most of their operations over there. Zukertort had the better game until he incorrectly traded on move 24, opening up Blackburne's position. As the White position sprang to life, Zukertort tried to trade off the Queens, but dropped a pawn in the process. The endgame, as usual, was dutifully converted by Blackburne, who brought the deficit down to only two games.
Blackburne switched to the French for the next game, and if he had traded on f3 at move 11, we would've had a much for exciting game than the Exchange French tends to be. There was still enough excitement to go around, as Blackburne sacrificed a pawn with his 16th move, though with best play it was only good enough for equality. A recurring theme throughout this match (and throughout Blackburne's career) is that the British champion rarely contented himself with playing for the draw, and tried a little too hard to create action when restraint was appropriate. This resulted in him dropping another pawn right at the time control, and Zukertort brought himself up to four wins.
A short draw in the following game brought what I'm informally calling "phase one" of the match to a close, the score being 4-1 for Zukertort (with three draws).
Phase two saw Zukertort move away from 1. e4 and transition to using his "irregular openings," which were really just QGD transposition vehicles. This is where I really started noticing the massive time differential between the two players; Blackburne would often spend over an hour more than Zukertort throughout the games, according to the notes in The Chess-Monthly. It's clear that Blackburne was much less comfortable in this opening than his opponent, both in his time usage and his moves. The second of the two following games is the clearest example, with Blackburne getting into trouble on the c-file, then collapsing after an incorrect recapture.
Phase two also had a couple of very interesting draws, which (rather unusually) got more respect from the press than most of the decisive games. The first took place between the two previous games, with Blackburne switching his opening to the Scotch. Zukertort responded to the sixth move novelty poorly, and he never fully equalized. The game was a mess of complications that neither player handled perfectly, but Blackburne always had some semblance of an initiative and was surely for choice. While his play following an exchange sacrifice was also unclean, he was able to get a favourable endgame right before the game was adjourned for two days.
When the game was resumed, the errors continued. There were two moments when Blackburne should have won: once on move 53, when he could've gotten a passed pawn on the c-file that should've decided things; and again on move 55, where he could have straightforwardly trapped Zukertort's Bishop. He missed both of these, and Zukertort managed to steer things into an opposite coloured Bishop endgame that Blackburne couldn't manage to convert.
Going into game 12, Zukertort was up 6-1, and the next win would seal things for him. Blackburne needed to dig in deep, and he was rewarded with a one move blunder that I hardly want to talk about. The next game really should've been the last, with Zukertort once again easily outplaying Blackburne in a similar QGD-ish system. He got a passed pawn on d6, and his usual maneuvering got Blackburne to try another direct assault, which ultimately saw Black go two pawns down. Zukertort later converted this to a full Knight up, but Blackburne obviously couldn't resign. His patience was rewarded on move 68, when Zukertort's erroneous pawn push allowed Blackburne's King to slip into the position safely, and a draw was snatched out of thin air.
Doubtlessly emboldened by the shifting momentum, Blackburne repeated his Scotch opening, improving his 10th move but getting into trouble with his 11th. He dropped (or perhaps sacrificed?) his h-pawn, choosing to focus all of his attention on the Queenside to attack Zukertort's King. There wasn't much of an attack to be seen, and this time, there were no freebies from Zukertort. He played a well-timed break in the center, picked up a second pawn shortly before the time control, and fired off a temporary exchange sacrifice to ensure Blackburne would run out of attackers. A few empty threats and procedural checks later, and Blackburne finally threw in the towel to conclude a surprisingly lopsided match.
Conclusion
The final score was 7-2 (5 draws) for Zukertort, cementing him as the strongest active player, and perhaps the strongest overall depending on your thoughts on Steinitz (and Paul Morphy, I guess). This was just total domination—Zukertort was faster, more comfortable in unclear positions, and better prepared in the openings than Blackburne. Blackburne was always a relatively bad match player (his match accolades were far fewer than his tournament successes), but this was still doubtlessly a blow to him.
There will be no voting yet, as we still have about 20 more games to go through between these two. Fun! I'm hoping to have more time as the month progresses (as my semester will be ending), so I'm optimistically trying to get these next two parts out before the end of April. Here's hoping that we aren't here for too much longer; this is an entertaining match, but reading Zukertort's analysis is exhausting (there's so much of it).
As promised, a raw copy of all of the games. Do with them what you will.
Cheers
