by National Life Master Loal Davis

Paul Charles Morphy (June 22, 1837 – July 10, 1884) was an American chess player. He is considered to have been the greatest chess master of his era and an unofficial World Chess Champion. He was a chess prodigy and called “The Pride and Sorrow of Chess”; pride because he had a brief and brilliant chess career; sorrow because he retired from the game while still very young.

Many think of Morphy as a dazzling combinative player, who excelled at sacrifices and brilliantly checkmating his opponent, but it was not the basis of his chess style.

Morphy treats chess with the seriousness and conscientiousness of an artist … For him a game of chess is a sacred duty.

-  Adolf Anderssen

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.

-  Bobby Fischer

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.

-  Mikhail Botvinnik

Morphy was probably the greatest genius of them all.

-  Bobby Fischer

On September 27, 1858, Morphy gave an 8-board blindfold exhibition, winning 6 games and drawing 2 games.  It was held at the Café de la Régence.  The owner of the café wanted to charge a spectator fee of 5 francs for the exhibition, but Morphy said he would not give the exhibition unless the café was open to anyone who walked in.  So the event was free for anyone who could get inside the establishment.  His opponents were Baucher, Bierwith, Borneman, Guibert, Lequesne, Potier, Preti, and Seguin (and 50 other players in the room to give advice to Morphy’s 8 opponents).   Morphy was seated in the billiard room of the café, with his back to the chess table in the other room .  The blindfold exhibition lasted for 10 hours, without anything to eat or drink for Morphy.  When the event was over, it took 30 minutes for Morphy to get outside of the café after being congratulated by everyone inside.  However, the crowd outside was greater than the one inside the café, and the shouting was more deafening.  French Imperial guards, not knowing what was going on, thought a new revolution in Paris had broken out.

The next morning for over two hours, Paul dictated all the moves (and hundreds of variations) of his 8 blindfold games from the previous night.

The following was the longest game of the exhibition, finishing last.  It is a masterpiece and worthy of anyone playing it over the board, much less blindfolded.

For the complete annotated PGN file, please see Comments