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Editor: Dr Tim Harding |
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Editor: Dr Tim Harding |
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© Dr Tim Harding
Last modified:
26 September 2026
The international tournament at Hastings in the summer of 1895 was one of the most important chess events of the nineteenth century. The field of 22 included most of the top players in the world and only two players (Samuel Tinsley of England and Beniamino Vergani of Italy) who did not really belong in the company of great masters.
This was the first of the long series of chess tournaments played in the Sussex coastal resort and came about through the initiative of the local chess club with the support of the great master Joseph Henry Blackburne, who was a Hastings resident at that time, and of Leopold Hoffer, the leading chess journalist who had extensive contacts throughout the chess world.
The visitors from abroad included the world champion Emanuel Lasker, his predecessor William Steinitz (returning to Europe for the first time in 12 years), grandmasters Dr. Siegbert Tarrasch and Mikhail Chigorin, and the upcoming Carl Schlechter in only his second international tournament. Yet after four weeks of intense competition the eventual winner was Harry Nelson Pillsbury of the USA, scoring the greatest victory of his career.
The tournament began on the 5th of August 1895 and the last round started on September 2nd with a few adjourned games completed next day. The lead changed hands a few times with Chigorin, Lasker and Pillsbury emerging as the likely winners with a few rounds to go.
Hastings 1895 was a single round-robin event with one peculiarity also seen in some other tournaments of the era: randomisation of the draw. Pairings were done as usual before play began but then each round’s pairings were placed in sealed envelopes in order to minimise the possibility of preparation for games. It was only decided by lot each morning which round would be played that day so that (except for the last round when only one possibility was left) the players had little notice of who their opponent of the day would be.
A major drawback of this system was that a player could have a run of games with the same colour. Steinitz was lucky: after starting with two Whites, he had a perfect alternation of colours throughout the tournament, but this was pure chance, as was the fact that whereas Amos Burn had a perfect alternation of colours. Blackburne, on the other hand, had three successive Whites in rounds 9-11, which would never happen in a round-robin tournament nowadays. Schlechter had three Blacks in a row from rounds 4-6 and again in the last three rounds. In between, he twice had runs of three Whites.
Some players had even more extreme sequences. Pillsbury had four Whites in a row from rounds 2-5, so after losing to Chigorin in the first round he made hay and was on three and a half points after five rounds. Then from rounds 11-15 he had five Blacks in a row; he lost to Lasker but managed three points from the other games in this sequence. Lasker himself began with two Whites and then three Blacks. From rounds 11-14 he had four Whites in a row but this was followed by Black in five successive rounds. Tarrasch also had a run of five Blacks at one point.
The home contingent did not do well in the tournament, with only Blackburne managing 50 per cent (nine wins, nine losses and three draws). Burn was out of practice after taking a long break from chess, while Bird was ageing, Gunsberg was now primarily a chess journalist, as was Tinsley (chess correspondent of The Times), one of the two controversial selections.
Originally the organisers had envisaged 16 competitors but they received 38 entries and decided to accept 22 and had to make a choice. The weakest in the field was the Italian, Vergani, and the tournament would certainly have been stronger had Maroczy (who won the supporting tournament) been selected instead from the entries received by the committee, but this was early in his career.
The tournament was memorialised, as our next article will show, by two tournament books — the official one in English followed by a German book in algebraic notation — but there are major discrepancies between the two books concerning the scores of several of the games. This uncertainty over what was played in more than thirty of the 232 games was barely noticed, if at all, by the editors of the two centenary editions. Certainly they made no comment about it.
So the mistakes and uncertainties have been carried over into the databases of today and there is as yet no one source that definitively supplies the correct record of what actually happened. This is what we hope to rectify in this series.
Our final introductory article will explain how this sad situation came about and what we are attempting to do to resolve these issues. We shall then proceed to discuss the problem games, round by round, and provide what we believe is the most accurate record of this important tournament.
Back to the introduction page.