Synopsis
Published in 1777, and including the text of the 1749 edition, this is possibly the first chess book in English. The greatest chess-player amongst musicians and the greatest composer amongst chess-players, Philidor was undoubtedly the leading player in the eighteenth century. For nearly fifty years he was what we would now call World Champion and for many of these years he was the leading opera composer in France. Our Philidor was born in 1726 near Paris and was remarkably precocious, both in music and chess. By the age of eleven he had had a motet performed at the Chapel Royal in Versailles and he was already a fine chess-player in his early teens. The best player in France, M. de Kermur, Sire de Legal, took an interest in the boy. At first it seems he gave him the odds of a Rook, then, after three more years, had to play him level and finally he was beaten by his erstwhile pupil in a match in 1750. But already for some years he had been considered the best player in France. It is interesting to observe that he never regarded himself as a professional chess-player but solely as a musician who supplemented his income from composing by playing chess and giving blindfold displays. In 1747 he utilized these introductions on a visit to England where he demonstrated how much greater a player he was than any of his contemporaries by beating Philip Stamma in a match at odds in London by 8-1. This was an astonishing feat since Philidor gave Stamma the odds of the move and the formidable advantage that any drawn game should count as a win for Stamma. He returned to the Continent and there wrote and published in 1749 in Paris the celebrated Analyse du jeu des Echecs. The theme of the work - that 'pawns are the soul of chess' - was so modern as to be about two hundred years before its time. It was rather as though Nimzowitsch and his theories of the twentieth century were contemporary with Philidor: he was not really understood until a couple of centuries had passed. But what he wrote on the endgame and his general advice was obviously sound and marked a step forward in the way of scientific analysis.
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Présentation de l'éditeur
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
Présentation de l'éditeur
Analysis of the Game of Chess was written by Danican Philidor in 1790. This is a 438 page book, containing 56935 words and 13 pictures. Search Inside is enabled for this title.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
About the Publisher
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