Amsterdam 1889: A Young Lasker Arrives
By the summer of 1889 Emanuel Lasker was a 20-year-old mathematics student from Berlin, five years away from the world title he would hold for a record 27 years. The Amsterdam tournament was one of his first serious international tests, and his opponent in this game, the Austrian master Johann Hermann Bauer, was a respected professional. Nothing in the opening suggested violence. Lasker opened with 1.f4, the Bird's Opening, fianchettoed his queen's bishop with b3 and Bb2, and developed his light-squared bishop to d3, aimed quietly at h7. Bauer played a sensible Queen's Indian style setup with b6, Bb7 and short castling. Students of chess strategy will recognise the configuration immediately: both white bishops trained on the long diagonals converging on the black king. In 1889, nobody yet knew quite how dangerous that geometry could be. Lasker was about to demonstrate it, and his demonstration would echo through chess history.
The Combination: 15.Bxh7+ and 17.Bxg7
The trigger came on move 14. Lasker played 14.Nh5, offering a knight trade, and Bauer obliged with 14...Nxh5, removing the last defender of the kingside. Then the storm broke: 15.Bxh7+ Kxh7 16.Qxh5+ Kg8, and now the move that made the game immortal, 17.Bxg7. Declining was hopeless, since the bishop would simply continue taking, so Bauer played 17...Kxg7. After 18.Qg4+ Kh7 19.Rf3, the rook lift threatened mate on h3, and Bauer's only defence was to give up his queen: 19...e5 20.Rh3+ Qh6 21.Rxh6+ Kxh6. Two bishops for a queen looks roughly balanced on the abacus, but Lasker had calculated one move further than the king hunt. The quiet 22.Qd7 forked Bauer's two undefended bishops on b7 and e7, winning a full piece. That double attack is the soul of the combination, the resource that converts a spectacular raid into cold accounting.
Why the Sacrifice Was Extraordinary
Sacrifices on h7 were already well known in 1889. The single bishop sacrifice, the Greek Gift, had been understood since Greco's manuscripts in the 1600s. What no one had demonstrated in a famous master game was that both bishops could be spent, one after the other, to remove both pawns from the king's shelter. The idea is counterintuitive: bishops were prized attacking pieces, and giving up the pair meant betting the entire game on the attack succeeding. Lasker's genius lay in seeing that the attack did not even need to deliver mate. The combination contained its own insurance policy in 22.Qd7, the fork that regained material with interest. That is what separates it from a romantic-era gamble. The nineteenth century produced many famous chess games built on sacrifice, but most relied on cooperative defence. Lasker's combination was sound against best play, and that soundness is why it became a teachable pattern rather than a museum piece among chess tactics.
The Aftermath: Bauer's Collapse and Lasker's Rise
Material down and king exposed, Bauer fought on for another sixteen moves, but the result was never in doubt. Lasker picked up further pawns, and Bauer resigned on move 38. Lasker won the Amsterdam tournament, announcing himself to the chess world, and within five years he had defeated Wilhelm Steinitz to become the second official world champion. He would defend the title until 1921, the longest reign in the history of the World Chess Championships. For Bauer the game became an unwanted immortality: a strong master remembered chiefly as the canvas for someone else's masterpiece. He died young, of tuberculosis, in 1891, barely two years after the game. The combination, meanwhile, took on a life of its own, reprinted in tournament books and magazines across Europe, studied by every ambitious player among the famous chess players of the next generation.
The Legacy: A Pattern with Lasker's Name on It
The clearest proof of the game's influence came 25 years later. At St Petersburg 1914, Aron Nimzowitsch fell victim to the identical mechanism at the hands of Siegbert Tarrasch: Bxh7+, Qh5+, Bxg7, rook lift, demolition. Annotators did not need to explain the idea, they simply called it Lasker's combination. Since then the double bishop sacrifice has appeared in hundreds of master games, including famous renditions by Kasparov and Judit Polgar, and it occupies a chapter in virtually every attacking textbook ever written. Modern authors have distilled the preconditions: both bishops bearing on the king, the queen with a fast route to the h-file, a rook ready to lift, and a material safety net if the king escapes. Historians note, honestly, that scattered earlier examples of similar ideas may exist in minor games, so "first recorded" carries a small asterisk. But priority disputes miss the point. Lasker's game is the one that taught the world the pattern.
The Board It Was Played On
The Amsterdam tournament of 1889 belonged to the first fully standardised era of competitive chess. Forty years earlier, the equipment itself had been chaos: regional designs like the St George and Selenus patterns made pieces from one city unrecognisable in another. That problem was solved in 1849 when Jaques of London created the Staunton chess set, registered by their collaborator Nathaniel Cook and endorsed by Howard Staunton, then the strongest player in the world. By Lasker's day the Staunton pattern was simply how serious chess looked. The broad-based king, the knight carved after the Elgin Marbles, the clean bishop's mitre: these were the shapes on the table in Amsterdam as Bauer watched two of them, the bishops, leave the board in flames. Whether you study sacrificial attacks or quiet chess endgames, the pieces you study them with descend from that 1849 design.
Jaques of London — Making Chess Sets Since 1849
When Lasker played his double bishop sacrifice in 1889, the Staunton pattern pieces created by Jaques of London in 1849 were already the universal standard for serious play across Europe. Tournament halls from London to Amsterdam set their boards with Staunton pieces, and the bishops Lasker sacrificed took the same form Jaques still crafts today. Every Jaques set carries 175 years of unbroken chess heritage from the workshop that gave the game its standard.
Shop Staunton Chess Sets →Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What exactly happened in Lasker vs Bauer, Amsterdam 1889?
Playing White in a Bird's Opening at the Amsterdam tournament of 1889, the 20-year-old Emanuel Lasker built up a quiet position against the Austrian master Johann Hermann Bauer, then unleashed two consecutive bishop sacrifices against the castled king. After 14.Nh5 Nxh5 he played 15.Bxh7+ Kxh7 16.Qxh5+ Kg8 17.Bxg7, and when Bauer captured the second bishop, 18.Qg4+ Kh7 19.Rf3 forced the queen to give itself up to stop mate. The hidden point came with 22.Qd7, a double attack that won one of Bauer's two bishops and left Lasker with a decisive material advantage. Lasker converted cleanly and won the game, and went on to win the tournament.
Q: Why does the double bishop sacrifice work?
The two sacrifices strip away both pawns that shelter the castled king, the h-pawn and the g-pawn, leaving the king naked on an open board. The first sacrifice, Bxh7+, drags the king out or removes the h-pawn with check, and the queen arrives on h5 with tempo. The second, Bxg7, cannot safely be declined because the bishop will simply take more material, yet accepting it opens the g-file for a rook lift. The defender faces queen checks and a rook swinging to the third rank at the same time, and usually must return the queen to avoid mate. Crucially, the attacker needs a follow-up that regains material, as Lasker's 22.Qd7 fork did, otherwise two pieces have been spent on a king hunt that may run dry.
Q: Was Lasker really the first to play the double bishop sacrifice?
Lasker vs Bauer is the first famous, fully documented example of the two-bishop demolition in master play, and the pattern has carried Lasker's name ever since. Chess historians have noted that isolated earlier instances of similar two-bishop ideas may exist in obscure nineteenth-century games, so the claim of absolute priority is treated with some caution in scholarly sources. What is not in dispute is that Lasker's game was the one that entered the literature, was analysed and anthologised, and taught later generations the mechanism. When Nimzowitsch repeated the idea against Tarrasch at St Petersburg 1914, annotators immediately recognised it as Lasker's combination, which shows how completely the 1889 game had defined the pattern.
Q: What conditions are needed to play the Lasker double bishop sacrifice today?
Modern attacking manuals list the requirements precisely because Lasker's game made them visible. The attacker needs both bishops raking the long diagonals towards the castled king, a queen able to reach the h-file quickly, usually via h5, and a rook that can lift to the third rank to join the attack. The defender's knight must be unable to return to f6 or f8 to cover the king, and the defending queen and rooks must be too far away to help in time. Finally, the attacker should verify a material safety net: if the king escapes the mating net, there must be a forcing resource, like Lasker's Qd7 double attack, that wins material back. If any element is missing, the sacrifice is unsound.