Berlin, 1852: A Casual Game That Became Immortal
The Evergreen Game was not played in a tournament. There was no prize, no audience, no grandmaster title at stake. Adolf Anderssen and Jean Dufresne were playing the kind of informal game that filled the chess clubs and coffee houses of mid-nineteenth-century Berlin, the social settings in which the culture of competitive chess was quietly taking shape. That it produced one of the most celebrated combinations in the history of the game says everything about the depth Anderssen carried into every position he entered, regardless of the occasion.
Anderssen was at the height of his powers. He had won the great London Tournament of 1851, defeating Howard Staunton, Lionel Kieseritzky, and Marmaduke Wyvill on his way to the title of the world's strongest player. A year earlier, against Kieseritzky, he had produced the Immortal Game, another combination built on multiple sacrifices. By 1852, Anderssen was not experimenting. He was a player who had absorbed the Romantic school's belief in attack so completely that such moves came naturally to him. The Evergreen Game is not a lucky accident. It is the product of a mind trained to see further than his contemporaries.
Dufresne was a serious Berlin player and chess writer, a regular opponent and a man who contributed significantly to German chess literature. He was a fitting adversary for a casual encounter. That the game was preserved at all is partly due to Dufresne's own role in documenting the chess of his era. Among the famous chess games of the nineteenth century, its survival in such complete form is partly his legacy.
The Evans Gambit and the Romantic Era of Attack
The game opened 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4, the Italian Game, before Anderssen played 4.b4, the Evans Gambit, one of the sharpest and most fashionable openings of the 1840s and 1850s. The Evans Gambit offers White a pawn in exchange for rapid development and the opening of the c-file and b-file against Black's position. It demands an immediate response and punishes passivity harshly.
The Evans Gambit was ideally suited to the chess culture of the Romantic era, a period in which beauty of attack was valued above precision of defence, and sacrificial play was regarded as the mark of a true master. Anderssen had used it to great effect in many games before 1852. Its acceptance, as Dufresne chose here with 4...Bxb4, leads to open, complicated positions where the player with the better feel for piece activity tends to prevail.
By the middle of the game, Anderssen had the kind of position the Evans Gambit promises: open lines, active pieces, and Black's king still in the centre. Dufresne had accepted material but had fallen behind in development and had not found a safe haven for his king. The tactical storm that Anderssen unleashed in the final phase of the game was not improvised. It grew directly from the positional imbalances that the opening had created. In the context of chess history, the game is a perfect specimen of Romantic chess: opening theory harnessed in service of a devastating attack.
The Combination: Double Rook Sacrifice and the Queen Offered
The critical sequence begins on move 18. Anderssen had already built a formidable attack, with his pieces converging on Dufresne's exposed king. On move 18, he played 18.Bd6, placing a bishop where it attacks a rook and cannot be safely taken. Dufresne replied 18...Bxg1, capturing Anderssen's rook on h1. Rather than recapturing, Anderssen left the rook where it was and played 19.e5, a pawn advance that continued the attack. Dufresne took the second rook on a1 with 19...Qxa1+. Anderssen now had no rooks at all.
What followed was a sequence of forcing moves that left Dufresne's king cornered. After 20.Ke2 Na4 21.Nxg7+ Kd8, Anderssen arrived at the position that made the game famous. Rather than capturing a pawn that would have given him a new queen on the next move, he played 22.Qxd7+, an offer of his most powerful piece. After 22...Kxd7, Anderssen delivered checkmate with 23.Bf5#. The game was over.
The combination is remarkable on several levels. The two rooks were sacrificed not in a single flashy gesture but through a sequence of quiet-looking moves that maintained the pressure. The queen sacrifice on move 22, when a queen promotion was available, required Anderssen to see all the way to the bishop checkmate three moves ahead. Among famous chess players, very few have produced a combination of this structural elegance at this time depth.
Zukertort, the Name, and the Game's Reception
Johannes Zukertort, the Polish-German master who would go on to contest the first official World Chess Championship against Wilhelm Steinitz in 1886, was one of the great annotators and historians of nineteenth-century chess. It was Zukertort who gave the game its name, describing it as "evergreen" in his published analysis: a game whose brilliance, unlike the brilliance of many admired combinations, would never be diminished by the passage of time or the advance of chess understanding.
Zukertort's judgment has proved correct. The Evergreen Game has been subjected to modern computer analysis, and while engines find improvements for Dufresne, the combination itself remains sound. The queen sacrifice on move 22 is not a blunder by the opponent rescued by luck. It is a forced win. The game's reputation has not faded with the development of defensive theory or the emergence of positional chess. It stands, in the twenty-first century, exactly as it stood when Zukertort named it: a masterpiece of combinatorial chess that does not age.
The game was published widely in the chess press of the 1850s and became a standard item in chess anthologies throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It appears in virtually every major collection of chess brilliancies and has been used as a teaching example in countless instruction books. Few informal games in the history of chess have had a longer or more assured afterlife.
Anderssen in Context: The Strongest Player of His Era
Adolf Anderssen (1818-1879) is one of the central figures of chess history. Born in Breslau (now Wroclaw), he was a mathematics teacher by profession and a chess player of a quality that set him apart from virtually every contemporary. His victory at the London Tournament of 1851 established him as the unofficial world champion, a title he held until Paul Morphy's tour of Europe in 1858 and then reclaimed after Morphy's retirement from competitive chess.
Anderssen's style was characterised by an absolute commitment to the attack. He was not unaware of positional considerations but he pursued attacking opportunities with a directness that his opponents found difficult to resist. The Immortal Game of 1851 and the Evergreen Game of 1852 are the peaks of his output but they were not anomalies. He produced brilliancies throughout his career. His games against Zukertort in 1871, when he was already in his early fifties, contain attacking combinations of considerable depth.
In the broader context of the Romantic era, Anderssen represented the summit of a school of chess that would eventually be challenged by Steinitz's positional revolution. But the games he left behind are not merely period pieces. They are studies in calculation and tactical vision that remain instructive today. The Evergreen Game, played informally in Berlin three years after Jaques of London had standardised the equipment of the game, is his most enduring single contribution.
Legacy: What the Evergreen Game Teaches
The Evergreen Game occupies a specific place in chess pedagogy. It is used to teach the concept of the initiative: the idea that in certain positions, maintaining the pressure of an attack is worth more than material, and that allowing an opponent to consolidate can be fatal even from a position of apparent material advantage. Anderssen demonstrated this principle with unusual clarity. His two rooks were taken. His queen was offered. But at no point did he lose the initiative, and the forced checkmate that ended the game was the direct consequence of that unbroken pressure.
The game also teaches pattern recognition. The double rook sacrifice, the queen sacrifice leading to a quiet closing move: these motifs have appeared in games played long after 1852, in many cases by players who had studied Anderssen's combination. Chess education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was built substantially on such examples, and the Evergreen Game was among the most cited in the literature.
For students of chess today, the game remains a starting point for understanding what sacrificial attack means at its highest level. It belongs in the same company as the Immortal Game of 1851 and the games of Mikhail Tal in the twentieth century: positions where the board catches fire and the logic of the attack proves more powerful than the arithmetic of material. The Evergreen Game will not age. Zukertort was right to say so.
Jaques of London — Making Chess Sets Since 1849
The Staunton pattern pieces, created by Jaques of London in 1849, were already the universal standard for serious chess by 1852. Every tournament game, every championship encounter, every casual game in the clubs and coffee houses of Europe was played on the Staunton design that Jaques had introduced just three years earlier. The informal Berlin encounter between Anderssen and Dufresne would have been played on exactly the same pattern, the Staunton chess set that Jaques of London had brought to the world and that would remain the global standard for over 175 years.
Shop Staunton Chess Sets →Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why is the Anderssen vs Dufresne game of 1852 called the Evergreen Game?
The name was coined by the German chess historian and master Johannes Zukertort, who described the game as 'evergreen' because he believed its brilliance would never fade with time. Unlike games whose reputations rest on the weakness of a particular opponent, the Evergreen Game features sacrifices so bold and a finish so precise that they remain astonishing regardless of the era in which they are studied. Zukertort's epithet stuck, and the game has been known by that name ever since. It stands alongside the Immortal Game of 1851 as the defining masterwork of Adolf Anderssen's career.
Q: What were the key sacrifices in the Evergreen Game?
The game contains two of the most celebrated sacrificial sequences in chess history. First, Anderssen sacrificed both rooks on moves 18 and 19, leaving them to be captured rather than recapturing them. Then, on move 22, he declined to take a back-rank pawn that would have promoted to a new queen, and instead played 22.Qxd7+, offering his most powerful piece. After Dufresne captured with the king, Anderssen delivered checkmate with 23.Bf5#, a quiet bishop move that ended the game. The double rook sacrifice followed by a queen sacrifice and a concluding bishop move, all within five moves, represents a combination of extraordinary depth and enduring beauty.
Q: Who was Jean Dufresne, Anderssen's opponent in the Evergreen Game?
Jean Dufresne (1829-1893) was a German chess player, author, and journalist based in Berlin. He was a capable amateur of his era and a prolific writer on the game, producing several chess instruction books and collections that helped popularise chess across the German-speaking world. He was not in Anderssen's class as a player but was a respected figure in Berlin chess circles. The casual nature of the 1852 game, played informally rather than in a match or tournament, reflects the social chess culture of the period. Dufresne later published accounts of many games from the era, contributing to the historical record of nineteenth-century German chess.
Q: What opening was played in the Evergreen Game, and why does it matter?
The game opened with the Evans Gambit, a sharp nineteenth-century opening in which White offers a pawn on move four with 4.b4 to accelerate development and open lines against Black's king. The Evans Gambit was the favourite weapon of the Romantic era, prized for producing the open, tactical positions where sacrificial attacks could flourish. Anderssen was one of the great Evans Gambit practitioners and had demonstrated its potential in several celebrated games before 1852. The opening choice was not incidental: it set up the conditions for the tactical fireworks that followed. By the middle game, Anderssen had the open lines and piece activity the gambit promises, and he converted them into one of the most celebrated combinations in chess history.