What the 1851 Immortal Game Still Teaches Kids

By Lalit Akhade, Founder & Head Coach, ChessMates Academy · Published 2026-08-22 · 5 min read

The Most Famous Chess Game Nobody Meant to Play

On the afternoon of Saturday, June 21, 1851, two men sat down for a casual game at Simpson's Grand Divan, a chess and coffee house on London's Strand. It wasn't a tournament match — the real event, the first great international chess tournament, was happening a few streets away. This was just two players filling an afternoon.

One was Adolf Anderssen, a quiet mathematics teacher from Breslau, in Germany. The other was Lionel Kieseritzky, a professional player from Livonia who made his living teaching chess in Paris for five francs an hour. Neither man could have known they were about to play a game still studied by chess students 175 years later.

The Sacrifice That Made It "Immortal"

What happened over the next 23 moves is the reason the game is still famous. Anderssen didn't win by grinding Kieseritzky down or trading pieces carefully. He won by giving almost everything away.

First he offered a bishop. Then both of his rooks. Then, most astonishingly, his queen — the most powerful piece on the board. By the time the smoke cleared, Anderssen had only three minor pieces left: two bishops and a knight. Most players would call that a losing position. Instead, Anderssen used those three remaining pieces to deliver checkmate.

It's one of the most extreme material sacrifices in recorded chess history, and it worked because Anderssen wasn't thinking about how many pieces he had left — he was thinking about where the king was and how fast he could get there. That single shift in thinking is still the whole point of chess tactics, and it's exactly what topics like basic chess tactics kids must know try to teach today: material only matters if it helps you win. If it doesn't, it's just decoration.

Why We Even Know About It

Here's a detail most retellings skip: Kieseritzky lost, and he still helped make the game famous. Right after the match, he was so struck by what Anderssen had done that he telegraphed the moves to his own chess club back in Paris. The French chess magazine *La Régence* published the game the following month. Four years later, in 1855, a chess writer named Ernst Falkbeer — the same Falkbeer remembered today for the Falkbeer Countergambit opening — gave the game its lasting nickname: the Immortal Game.

So the most celebrated chess game of the 19th century survives not because the winner bragged about it, but because the loser recognized he'd just been part of something remarkable and made sure it wasn't forgotten. That's a small lesson worth passing on to a child who just lost a game to a clever combination: sometimes the most useful thing you can do after a loss is study exactly how it happened.

What This 175-Year-Old Game Teaches a Modern Beginner

It's tempting to watch the Immortal Game and take away "give away your queen, it'll work out." That is precisely the wrong lesson, and it's worth being direct about that with kids who are excited by the story. Anderssen wasn't reckless — he had calculated, move by move, that every sacrifice bought him something more valuable: time, open lines, and a king with nowhere to run. A beginner who copies the *result* without doing the *calculation* is just going to lose pieces for nothing, which is one of the most common patterns in beginner chess mistakes.

The real, transferable lessons are smaller and more practical:

Piece activity beats piece count. A queen doing nothing on the back rank is worth less than a bishop actively attacking the king.
Development and king safety come before material grabs. Anderssen's whole attack worked because Kieseritzky's king was stuck in the center, undefended.
Calculate before you sacrifice. Every piece Anderssen gave up was part of a line he'd worked out — this wasn't guessing.

These are the same ideas that show up in how we teach opening principles to beginners: get your pieces out, keep your king safe, and only then start looking for combinations.

A Fun Way to Use This With Your Child

The Immortal Game is short enough — just 23 moves — to play through together in ten minutes on any board or app. A good approach for a parent or young player:

Set up the board and play the first 10–12 moves as normal opening development.
When you reach the point where Anderssen offers his first rook, pause and ask: "Would you take it?" Most kids will say yes — it's free material. Let them sit with that instinct before showing what happens next.
Play out the rest and watch the checkmate land with almost no pieces on the board.

It's a genuinely fun way to show a child that chess isn't just about counting who has more — it's about who's actually winning the fight for the king. If your child enjoys stories like this, they'll probably enjoy digging through more classic chess facts and trivia too.

The Game Is Old. The Idea Isn't.

Chess has changed enormously since 1851 — engines, opening theory, and online play have all reshaped how the game is studied. But the core idea behind the Immortal Game hasn't aged a day: a piece is only as valuable as what it's doing for you right now. That's as true in a five-minute bullet game online today as it was in a smoky London coffee house 175 years ago, and it's one of the first real "aha" moments coaches try to build toward with new students.

If your child is just starting to notice ideas like this — piece activity, attacking the king, thinking a few moves ahead — a coach who can walk through games like this one with them, at their pace, tends to make it click faster than reading about it alone. ChessMates runs a free trial class where a real coach gets to see exactly where your child's game is at and what would help next — no pressure, just a good look at how they think over the board.