Sunday 24 May 2009

Beaten like a drum

The short story "Last Round" by Kester Svendsen is considered one of the best stories about chess ever written. It concerns the final round game of a post-Alekhine World Championship tournament, where the (unnamed) 'Old Master' needs to defeat the unbeatable Russian Rolavsky to win the title. He does so using the Danish Gambit (Goring actually) in a 19 move brilliancy.
The game used in the story was actually played between Charousek and Wollner in 1893. Searching Chessbase for the game, I discovered a couple of interesting things. Firstly, in my database the losers name is given as Volner. Secondly, assuming that Volner and Wollner are the same person, he only has two games in the database, and the second is another brilliant loss to Charousek.
I'm assuming that Wollner must have played more than 2 games in his career, but had the misfortune of losing so brilliantly, that only these losses were ever published.
Here is the second, and less well known, game.

Charousek,R - Wollner,J [C33]
Kassa, 1895

1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 3.Bc4 Be7 4.d4 Nf6 5.e5 Ne4 6.Bd5 Bh4+ 7.Kf1 Nf2 8.Qh5 0-0 9.Nf3 g6 10.Qh6 Nxh1 11.Nxh4 c6 12.Bxf4 cxd5 13.Nf5 gxf5 14.Bg5 f6 15.Bxf6 Rxf6 16.exf6 Qf8 17.Qg5+ Kh8 18.Nc3 Qg8(D)
19.Re1 Qxg5 20.Re8+ Qg8 21.f7 1-0

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