Paul Charles Morphy (1837-1884)

On the 22 day of June in the year 1837 Paul Charles Morphy was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a prosperous family. His father was a prominent attorney, and his family had a high social standing. Young Paul was taught the game of chess by his two grandfathers, a Spaniard and a Frenchman, and within two years of first playing the game the boy was acknowledged as city champion. When he was thirteen, he played three games against J. J. Lowenthal, one of the foremost players of the day, winning two and drawing one.

Morphy was admitted to Spring Hill College at the age of thirteen, graduating with honors in 1854. He was a brilliant student who spoke French, Spanish, and German fluently. After a year of graduate study, he attended the University of Louisiana law school and graduated in 1857 at the age of twenty, a year after the death of his father. He was admitted to the bar with the qualification that he could not practice law until he reached an appropriate age. The chess community imposed no such restriction. Already his reputation as a young master of the game had reached New York, and he was invited to attend the first American Chess Congress there in fall 1857. He went to New York and stole the show. He played quickly and with enough eccentric genius to make his game entertaining to watch. He left New York after the congress acknowledged him as the most talented chess player in the nation. When he returned to New Orleans, the short, nattily dressed, well-mannered Morphy was a celebrity, and he played to the audience. That winter he began publically playing simultaneous games of chess blindfolded, and astonished chess aficionados by managing to win six games in one blind sitting.

In summer 1858 Morphy went on a chess tour of England and Europe. The British champion, Howard Staunton, refused to play him, and Morphy responded by soundly beating Lowenthal, who had recently defeated Staunton, and then playing eight of England’s best players simultaneously while blindfolded: he won six of those games and played one game to a draw. In Paris he was similarly impressive. By the end of the tour he was acknowledged as the best chess player in the world, and he began to break under the pressure. He was unable to establish a career in law for himself in New Orleans, and increasingly he acceded to the wishes of his mother, who considered chess to be an interesting pastime but not a pursuit that should distract her son from serious work, which he seemed unable to undertake.

Morphy served as an editorial advisor for Chess Monthly late in the 1850s and wrote a column for the New York Ledger beginning in 1859, but in 1860 he began to withdraw from the chess community and from most other social contact. When the Civil War broke out, Morphy went to Havana and Paris with his mother and sister, playing arranged games under a low profile, avoiding publicity. After the war, he returned to New Orleans to live with his mother, and played only occasionally. His last recorded game was in 1869. It is generally thought that his career was ended by an emotional illness. He spent his last years obsessively preparing a lawsuit against the executor of his father’s estate, and his mother attempted to commit him to a mental institution at one point. In 1875, he refused an invitation to play at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. He died in 1884, less than three weeks after his forty-seventh birthday.

He was the greatest chess player of his time and one of the greater chess geniuses ever to have graced this planet!!

Who is the greatest chess-genius of all time?

Well, we present below the thoughts of a few gentlemen who themselves weren't all that bad at chess:

You may see the following quotes and others at:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Morphy

* "I consider Mr. Morphy the finest chess player who ever existed. He is far superior to any now living, and would doubtless have beaten Labourdonnais himself. In all his games with me, he has not only played, in every instance, the exact move, but the most exact. He never makes a mistake; but, if his adversary commits the slightest error, he is lost."

~ Adolf Anderssen, quoted by Frederick Edge in 1859

* "...Morphy was stronger than anyone he played with, including Anderssen"

~  Wilhelm Steinitz, International Chess Magazine 1885.

* "Paul Morphy was the greatest chess player that ever lived...no one ever was so far superior to the players of his time"

~ Dr. Emanuel Lasker, Lasker's Chess Magazine of January 1905, p.127

* "In Paul Morphy the spirit of La Bourdonnais had arisen anew, only more vigorous, firmer, prouder... Morphy discovered that the brilliant move of the master is essentially conditional not on a sudden and inexplicable realisation, but on the placing of the pieces on the board. He introduced the rule: brilliant moves and deep winning manoeuvres are possible only in those positions where the opponent can be opposed with an abundance of active energy... From the very first moves Morphy aimed to disclose the internal energy located in his pieces. It was suddenly revealed that they possess far greater dynamism than the opponent's forces."

~ Emanuel Lasker

* "Morphy's principal strength does not rest upon his power of combination but in his position play and his general style....Beginning with la Bourdonnais to the present, and including Lasker, we find that the greatest stylist has been Morphy. Whence the reason, although it might not be the only one, why he is generally considered the greatest of all."

~ José Raúl Capablanca, in Pablo Morphy by V. F. Coria and L. Palau.

* "Reviewing the history of chess from La Bourdonnais to the masters of our day right up to Lasker, we discover that the greatest stylist was Morphy. He did not look for complicated combinations, but he also did not avoid them, which really is the correct way of playing... His main strength lay not in his combinative gift, but in his positional play and general style. Morphy gained most of his wins by playing directly and simply, and it is this simple and logical method that constitutes the true brilliance of his play, if it is considered from the viewpoint of the great masters."

~ José Raúl Capablanca

* "[I play in] the style of Morphy, they say, and if it is true that the goddess of fortune has endowed me with his talent, the result [of the match with Emanuel Lasker] will not be in doubt. The magnificent American master had the most extraordinary brain that anybody has ever had for chess. Technique, strategy, tactics, knowledge which is inconceivable for us; all that was possessed by Morphy fifty-four years ago."

~ José Raúl Capablanca

* "How much more vivid, more rich does the figure of Morphy appear before us, how much clearer does the secret of his success and charm become, if we transfer ourselves in our thoughts to that era when he lived and created, if we take the trouble to study, only a little, his contemporaries! Then...in London and in particular in Paris, where the traditions of Philidor were still alive, where the immortal creations of La Bourdonnais and McDonnell were still in the memory, at that time, finally, when Anderssen was alive, and with brilliance alone it was hardly possible to surprise anyone. The strength, the invincible strength of Morphy- this was the reason for his success and the guarantee of his immortality!"

~ Alexander Alekhine

* "...Morphy, the master of all phases of the game, stronger than any of his opponents, even the strongest of them..."

~ Alexander Alekhine, in Shakmatny Vestnik, January 15, 1914

* "If the distinguishing feature of a genius is that he is far ahead compared with his epoch, then Morphy was a chess genius in the complete sense of the word."

~ Max Euwe

* "To this day Morphy is an unsurpassed master of the open games. Just how great was his significance is evident from the fact that after Morphy nothing substantially new has been created in this field. Every player- from beginner to master- should in this praxis return again and again to the games of the American genius."

~ Mikhail Botvinnik

* "There is no doubt that for Morphy chess was an art, and for chess Morphy was a great artist. His play was captivated by freshness of thought and inexhaustible energy. He played with inspiration, without striving to penetrate into the psychology of the opponent; he played, if one can express it so, "pure chess". His harmonious positional understanding; the pure intuition, would have made Morphy a highly dangerous opponent even for any player of our times."

~ Vassily Smyslov

* "A popularly held theory about Paul Morphy is that if he returned to the chess world today and played our best contemporary players, he would come out the loser. Nothing is further from the truth. In a set match, Morphy would beat anybody alive today... Morphy was perhaps the most accurate chess player who ever lived. He had complete sight of the board and never blundered, in spite of the fact that he played quite rapidly, rarely taking more than five minutes to decide a move. Perhaps his only weakness was in closed games like the Dutch Defense. But even then, he was usually victorious because of his resourcefulness."

~ Bobby Fischer

* "Morphy, I think everyone agrees, was probably the greatest genius of them all."

~ Bobby Fischer, 1992

* "We also remember the brilliant flight of the American super-genius Paul Morphy, who in a couple of years (1857-59) conquered both the New and the Old Worlds. He revealed a thunderous blend of pragmatism, aggression and accurate calculation to the world -- qualities that enabled America to accomplish a powerful spurt in the second half of the 19th century."

~ Garry Kasparov (2003). On My Great Predecessors. Gloucester Publishers plc. Vol. 1, p. 6. ISBN 1857443306.

* "What was the secret of Morphy's invincibility? I think it was a combination of a unique natural talent and brilliant erudition. His play was the next, more mature stage in the development of chess. Morphy had a well-developed 'feeling for position', and therefore he can be confidently regarded as the 'first swallow' - the prototype of the strong 20th century grandmaster."

~ Garry Kasparov (2003). On My Great Predecessors. Gloucester Publishers plc. Vol. 1, p. 43. ISBN 1857443306.

* "Morphy was the first positional player who, unlike his Romantic rivals, understood the strategic basis for attack. He wrote nothing more than a few game notes and played fewer than seventy-five serious games. But his exploitation of open lines prepared the way for Steinitz's scientific treatment of closed positions and the era of modern chess."      

~ Richard Réti

* "After the passage of a century, Morphy still remains the most glamorous figure that has ever appeared in the chess world."

~ Edward Lasker (in The Adventure of Chess, 2nd Edition, New York, 1959.)