The Polish Immortal — Najdorf's Piece Sacrifices, Warsaw 1930

Warsaw Between the Wars

Poland in the late 1920s was one of the strongest chess nations on earth. Akiba Rubinstein was in his final years of serious play, Savielly Tartakower carried the Polish flag at the great international tournaments, and Warsaw's chess cafes produced a stream of dangerous young masters. Among them was Mieczyslaw Najdorf, born in 1910, who would later be known to the world as Miguel. He was a pupil of Tartakower, and he absorbed his teacher's taste for combinative risk completely.

His opponent in this game, Glucksberg, was a Warsaw player about whom history records almost nothing, not even a confirmed first name. The date itself is uncertain. Sources give 1928, 1929, 1930, and occasionally 1935, and Najdorf, a marvellous raconteur who never let precision spoil a story, dated it differently over the years. What is not disputed is the game score, which has been checked move by move and stands as one of the most remarkable artefacts in chess history. Najdorf took the black pieces and answered 1.d4 with the Dutch Defence, an opening that stakes everything on a kingside attack.

The First Sacrifice: A Bishop Given in Two Instalments

The opening was quiet. After 1.d4 f5 2.c4 Nf6 3.Nc3 e6 4.Nf3 d5 5.e3 c6 6.Bd3 Bd6 7.O-O O-O 8.Ne2 Nbd7, White played the careless 9.Ng5, attacking e6 but neglecting his own king. Najdorf answered with the classical bishop sacrifice 9...Bxh2+. After 10.Kh1 Ng4 11.f4 Qe8 12.g3 Qh5 13.Kg2 the white king seemed to be slipping out, with the black bishop on h2 trapped and apparently lost for nothing.

Then came the move that lifts the game out of the ordinary: 13...Bg1. The bishop, already doomed, placed itself on the one square that mattered, sealing the back rank and denying the king its retreat. White had nothing better than 14.Nxg1, and after 14...Qh2+ 15.Kf3 the king was forced out into the open board. The first piece had been fully paid. The standard Greek Gift, covered in any survey of chess tactics, wins its bishop back with interest. Najdorf's bishop was simply gone, and the real spending had not yet begun.

Three More Pieces: The Knights and the Other Bishop Follow

With the white king on f3, Najdorf detonated the centre with 15...e5. After 16.dxe5 came the third sacrifice, 16...Ndxe5+, a knight hurled onto a defended square purely to drag the king further forward. White accepted with 17.fxe5 Nxe5+ 18.Kf4 Ng6+ 19.Kf3, and now 19...f4 renewed the assault. After 20.exf4 Bg4+ 21.Kxg4 the bishop, Black's last one, had given itself up to pull the king to the fourth rank.

One piece remained. Najdorf played 21...Ne5+, the fourth and final sacrifice, abandoning his last minor piece with check. After 22.fxe5 the white king stood on g4, surrounded by its own pieces and Black's pawns, and 22...h5 was checkmate. A pawn moving one square delivered the final blow. Black had no bishops and no knights left on the board. Every minor piece had been converted into one thing only: the forced march of the enemy king to its execution square. Engines have since confirmed that the attack was essentially sound throughout, which separates it from many romantic brilliancies of the era.

Why the Combination Works

The Polish Immortal is a king hunt, the most dramatic device in chess strategy, executed with unusual purity. Each sacrifice obeys the same logic: material is irrelevant if the king cannot get home. The first bishop opened the door, the second locked the escape hatch on g1, the first knight pulled the king through the doorway, and the second knight and bishop drove it up the board square by square. Najdorf never paused to collect material or consolidate. Any slow move would have allowed White to return pieces and survive.

The deeper point is one that Howard Staunton and the early masters already understood: exposed kings lose games, not material counts. What distinguishes Najdorf's version from the great sacrificial games of Anderssen's day is accuracy. Where many nineteenth century famous chess games contain defensive resources the loser missed, Glucksberg's captures were mostly forced, and modern analysis finds only marginal improvements. The combination is calculation, not hope. For a player of perhaps nineteen or twenty, the depth of foresight required to see h5 mate before playing 9...Bxh2+ remains astonishing.

Najdorf After Warsaw

The game's afterlife is inseparable from the tragedy of its author. Najdorf played for Poland at four Chess Olympiads, winning team medals alongside Tartakower. In August 1939 the Polish team travelled to Buenos Aires for the Olympiad; on 1 September, mid-tournament, Germany invaded Poland. Najdorf stayed in Argentina. His wife, daughter, father, mother, and brothers remained in Poland and were murdered in the Holocaust. He later gave record-breaking blindfold simultaneous displays, including 45 games at once in 1947, partly in the hope that surviving relatives might see his name in a newspaper.

As Miguel Najdorf of Argentina he became one of the strongest famous chess players of the century, a candidate for the world title in the early 1950s and a fixture of elite chess into his eighties. Though he never played a match for the crown, he defeated nearly every world champion of his lifetime in individual games, and the World Chess Championships from Fischer's era onward were fought largely on the terrain of the Sicilian Najdorf, the opening variation bearing his name.

The Legacy of the Polish Immortal

Tartakower is credited with naming the game, placing it deliberately in the lineage of Anderssen's Immortal Game of 1851. The comparison is apt but the accounting differs: Anderssen sacrificed a bishop, both rooks, and his queen; Najdorf gave up all four minor pieces, a feat with no equal in master chess. The game appears in virtually every anthology of attacking play and remains the standard demonstration that the Dutch Defence, for all its positional risks, conceals real venom.

For students, its lessons are concrete. The double bishop sacrifice, the decoy, the clearance, and the king hunt all appear in textbook form, and the finish is a reminder that even chess endgames logic, the power of the lowly pawn, governs the fiercest middlegame attacks. Najdorf himself rated it his finest game. Played on the standard tournament pieces of interwar Europe, the Staunton chess set, it endures as proof that immortality in chess is earned not by winning material but by ignoring it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What were the four piece sacrifices in the Polish Immortal?

Najdorf, playing Black in a Dutch Defence, gave up all four of his minor pieces. The dark-squared bishop went first: 9...Bxh2+ tore open the white king's shelter, and when escape seemed possible the same bishop played 13...Bg1, an extraordinary move that sealed the king's flight square and forced 14.Nxg1. The first knight followed with 16...Ndxe5+, dragging the white king up the board. The light-squared bishop gave itself with 20...Bg4+ 21.Kxg4, pulling the king to the fourth rank, and the last knight fell with 21...Ne5+ 22.fxe5, after which the humble pawn move 22...h5 delivered checkmate. Two bishops and two knights, all surrendered, with mate administered by a pawn.

Q: When exactly was the Polish Immortal played, and who was Glucksberg?

The honest answer is that the date is disputed. The game was played in Warsaw, and sources variously give 1928, 1929, 1930, and even 1935. Najdorf himself, a famously generous storyteller, dated it differently on different occasions, and no original tournament record pins it down. Most databases settle on circa 1929 or 1930, when Najdorf was a teenager or barely twenty. Glucksberg is similarly obscure: a Warsaw club player whose first name was never reliably recorded, remembered by history almost entirely for being on the wrong side of this masterpiece. None of this uncertainty affects the game itself, whose moves are well attested and have been verified sound by modern engines.

Q: Why is the game called the Polish Immortal?

The name follows the tradition begun by the original Immortal Game, Anderssen versus Kieseritzky, London 1851, in which spectacular sacrifices culminate in mate by minimal remaining force. Savielly Tartakower, the great Polish-French grandmaster and chess writer who knew Najdorf well from the Polish national team, is credited with christening the game the Polish Immortal. Both players were Polish, the game was played in Warsaw, and its quality earned it a place beside the Immortal and Evergreen games of the nineteenth century. The label stuck, and the game now appears in virtually every anthology of famous chess games as the finest of all Dutch Defence brilliancies.

Q: What happened to Najdorf after the Polish Immortal?

Najdorf became one of the strongest players of the twentieth century. He travelled with the Polish team to the 1939 Chess Olympiad in Buenos Aires; when Germany invaded Poland during the event, he stayed in Argentina. His wife, daughter, parents, and brothers remained behind and perished in the Holocaust. Najdorf rebuilt his life in Buenos Aires, won the Mar del Plata tournament repeatedly, set world blindfold simultaneous records partly in the hope his family might read of him in the newspapers, and was for a period in the late 1940s among the strongest active players in the world. The Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defence, the most analysed opening line in chess, carries his name.