The Evergreen Game: Anderssen's Second Masterpiece

Played in Berlin in 1852, a year after his more famous Immortal Game, Anderssen produced a second combinational masterpiece against Jean Dufresne that has since earned its own lasting nickname: the Evergreen Game, so called because a later commentator praised it as forever fresh and worth returning to, a description that has held up remarkably well across the century and a half since.

An Italian Game That Turns Explosive

The game began as an Evans Gambit, the same aggressive Italian Game sideline discussed elsewhere in this pipeline, where White offers a pawn on move four specifically to seize rapid development and open lines toward Black's king. As in the Immortal Game, Anderssen built a substantial lead in piece activity through the opening and early middlegame, while Dufresne, though far from a weak player himself, gradually fell behind in development while attempting to hold together a position under mounting, sustained pressure.

The Combination Begins

What makes this combination so celebrated is White's willingness, beginning around move 19, to give up the queen with 20.Qxd7+, trusting entirely in the resulting forced sequence of checks to deliver checkmate before Black's material advantage could ever be converted into anything meaningful. Every single one of Black's responses across the following moves was forced, with no genuine alternative available at any single point, which is precisely the quality that makes this combination such a frequently studied model of pure, calculated inevitability rather than a speculative gamble resting on hope that the opponent might miss something.

Why the Combination Is So Highly Regarded

Unlike some 19th-century combinations that later engine analysis revealed to contain a theoretical flaw somewhere along the way, the Evergreen Game's combination has held up remarkably well under exactly this kind of rigorous, modern scrutiny — the forcing sequence really was as close to fully sound as it appeared to Anderssen's contemporaries at the time, a genuinely impressive achievement for a combination calculated entirely without any computer assistance whatsoever. This objective soundness, combined with the same dramatic, decisive quality that defines the Immortal Game, is exactly why the two games are so often studied together as a matched, complementary pair.

Comparing the Evergreen Game to the Immortal Game

While both games showcase Anderssen's characteristic willingness to sacrifice material for overwhelming attacking activity, they differ in one genuinely instructive respect: where the Immortal Game sacrifices both rooks and a bishop across a longer, more sprawling combination, the Evergreen Game's decisive sacrifice is more compact and more purely forced, a single queen sacrifice leading directly and immediately into a completely forced mating sequence with no real branching alternatives along the way. Studying both games side by side highlights two genuinely distinct flavors of combinational brilliance: the Immortal Game's expansive, almost reckless-looking generosity with material, against the Evergreen Game's tighter, more surgically precise calculation.

Jean Dufresne's Role in Chess History

Dufresne, though remembered today primarily as the losing side of this single famous game, was himself a genuinely accomplished chess writer and author in his own right, whose instructional books remained influential and widely read for decades after this particular game was played. It's worth remembering, as with Anderssen's other famous opponent Kieseritzky, that losing a historically celebrated game to a genuinely brilliant combination says considerably more about the winner's exceptional calculation than it does about any deficiency in the losing player's own overall ability.

How to Study This Game Alongside the Immortal Game

Working through both games in sequence, specifically comparing how each combination's forcing sequence unfolds move by move, is an unusually efficient way to build genuine calculation confidence, since seeing two different, fully sound examples of a completely forced sequence reinforces exactly what "forced" actually means in concrete, practical terms — not merely a strong-looking continuation, but one where the defending side genuinely has no meaningful alternative at any single point along the way.

The "Evergreen" Nickname and Its Origin

The nickname is generally attributed to a description offered decades after the game was played, praising it as an evergreen, meaning perpetually fresh and worth returning to regardless of how much chess theory and understanding had advanced in the intervening years since it was first contested. Unlike the Immortal Game's nickname, which speaks to permanence and legendary stature, the Evergreen Game's name speaks specifically to its lasting instructive freshness — a game that continues to teach something genuinely useful to each new generation of players who encounter it, rather than simply being admired as a historical curiosity from a bygone era of the game.

What This Game Teaches About Forced Sequences

Beyond its historical significance, the Evergreen Game offers a genuinely clean teaching example of what a truly forced combination looks like in practice — every single one of Black's replies across the decisive sequence was essentially compulsory, with no meaningful alternative available at any single branch point along the way. Comparing this kind of fully forced sequence against combinations that merely look strong but actually contain a genuine alternative defense somewhere along the way is a valuable calibration exercise for any player working seriously to sharpen their own calculation and evaluation skills.

Anderssen's Broader Legacy Beyond These Two Games

While the Immortal Game and the Evergreen Game are by far his most widely reproduced games, Anderssen's broader tournament record across his career reflects a genuinely dominant player of his era, not simply the author of two spectacular but otherwise unrepresentative outings. His victory at London 1851, discussed elsewhere in this pipeline, established him as the era's leading player well before either of these two now-legendary games was even played, and his sustained results over the following two decades confirm that his combinational brilliance was a consistent, defining feature of his overall play, not an isolated flash of inspiration confined to just these two specific, famous occasions.

Comparing the Style to Later Attacking Eras

Anderssen's era predates the rise of more rigorous, defensively minded positional theory that later players like Steinitz would go on to develop, and his games are sometimes described as belonging to a distinctly "romantic" period of chess history, where speculative attacking play and dramatic material sacrifice were more widely accepted and celebrated practices than they would later become once defensive technique caught up considerably. Understanding this broader historical context helps explain why sacrifices of this scale were both possible and genuinely celebrated in his era, in a way that would likely draw more measured, skeptical scrutiny from a modern, well-prepared opponent equipped with far deeper defensive resources. That context makes the games no less brilliant in their own right, only easier to place accurately within their own particular time and setting in the sport's long, continuously evolving history, rather than judging them by standards that simply didn't exist yet when they were played.