The Opera Game

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Avatar of bjazz

This game was played in 1858 at the interlude of Night at the Opera, as the great Paul Morphy was invited to Paris' Opera by two quite strong chess afficionados; Duke Karl of Brunswick and Count Isouard who consulted together but couldn't hold their ground more than 16 moves. The game is one of chess history's most famous ones, but rarely found in any "best of chess" books because of the noble pair's less than Grandmaster standard of play. From a Philidor's defence situation, Morphy sac's all his pieces mating with the last remaining two. Enjoy

Comments are appreciated

Avatar of Scarblac

Morphy, not Murphy.

Avatar of bjazz

I stand corrected :)

Avatar of Vonzi

you did not say that morphy didnt play Qxb7 because of Qb4+

Avatar of bjazz

Yeah, sorry. It's the first time I've tried inserting a chess game and the first try went bonkers somehow, so I re-did it by copy-pasting  the comments. I think I missed Qb4+ in the first place as well though. Well observed

Avatar of Streptomicin

Omg, I wanted to post this same game but I just did not have time.

Avatar of DimKnight
bjazz wrote:

The game is one of chess history's most famous one's, but rarely found in any "best of chess" books because of the noble pair's less than Grandmaster standard of play.


Are you kidding? I can think of three books I have within an arm's reach that have extensive annotations of this game. It's usually presented as a "here's what not to do," but it's well represented in print.

Avatar of bjazz
DimKnight wrote:
bjazz wrote:

The game is one of chess history's most famous one's, but rarely found in any "best of chess" books because of the noble pair's less than Grandmaster standard of play.


Are you kidding? I can think of three books I have within an arm's reach that have extensive annotations of this game. It's usually presented as a "here's what not to do," but it's well represented in print.


 Yep, sorry. What I meant to communicate was that the game is not considered among the greatest games in the history of chess because of the lack of high standard play from both sides, and as such not found in books such as "the Mammoth Book of the World's Greatest Chess Games" by Nunn, Emms and Burgess, or other similar ones that concentrate mainly on the afore-mentioned standard. As I mentioned, it is one of the world's most famous games though.

Avatar of Pau


 Watch Opera Game film (8 min)

Avatar of luisa264

beautiful,what an artist(Morphy)

Avatar of RudeChessBoi

Genius, sacrificing valuable pieces to divert their important pieces from the action to do a materfully executed checkmate? Well done indeed.

Avatar of jxiao

You could put exclamation marks and question marks (for those who don't know: !!=brilliant, !=very strong, !?=interesting, ?!=dubious, ?=mistake, ??=blunder), for example, 9...b5?