Game Four: Zukertort-Blackburne, London 1883 "Chess is a game where the most intense activity leaves no trace."In his 1497 book Repeticion de Amores y Arte de Axedres, Luis Ramirez de Lucena observed, "Try to play soon after your opponent has eaten or drunk freely." Chess historians do not agree whether Johannes Hermann Zukertort ever studied Repeticion de Amores y Arte de Axedres, but empirical evidence would indeed suggest that, if he did, he did not take Ramirez de Lucena's well-intended advice seriously. Prussian Master Zukertort was known to have used opium to "calm his nerves," and was to have been seen drinking whisky during informal matches. His predilection for chemically-enhanced stimuli notwithstanding, Zukertort took 32 moves to defeat Joseph Blackburne, "the Black Death," with a brilliant sacrifice of his queen in a game that Steinitz himself described as "one of the most noble combinations conceived over the chess board." Ironically, Zukertort lost to Steinitz +5=5 -10 three years later in the first official World Championship Match. (The match, with stakes of $2,000, was sponsored by the Viceroy of India in an act of largess later emulated by his Highness the Maharajah of Travancore and Maharajah Vizayanagaram.) The defeat left Zukertort utterly devastated: "I am prepared to be taken away at any moment." Following these prophetic words, he died the very next day, felled by a stroke at Simpson's Divan. |
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