Study the famous games — every move annotated

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143 games

Every game in the library, move by move, with what each move was for. 143 games, 1609 notes, written by a person rather than generated by an engine — arranged first as a book, in 11 chapters with an argument each, and then by opening for looking things up.

Prefer to watch than to read? Every one of these plays out in 3D from the library. Prefer to solve? Every one of them ends in a mate you can go and find.

The book

85 of the 143, in an order — 11 chapters running from a game played in Valencia in 1475 to a world championship in 2016, and from a two-move mate to a fifty-move one. The rest of the library is underneath, by opening, which is what a reference is for. This is the other thing.

Chapter 1 6 games

Before there was a champion

Four hundred years of chess written down by people who were not keeping score of anything. The oldest game here was played in Valencia in 1475, in a poem, and the youngest in this chapter was played by Napoleon. What they have in common is that nobody involved thought of chess as a career.

Chapter 2 8 games

The mates that have names

Eight shapes, none of them longer than eleven moves. They are named because they keep happening — which means the point of this chapter is not the eight games but the eight patterns, and you will meet every one of them again further down the page in a game that took thirty moves to arrive at it.

Chapter 3 8 games

Anderssen, and what a gambit was for

A schoolmaster from Breslau who gave away more material than anybody before or since, in an age when a pawn was a thing you spent rather than a thing you kept. The first four are him losing and being on the receiving end of it, which is the half nobody prints; the chapter ends with the two games everybody knows.

Chapter 4 8 games

Morphy

The whole of it is one idea — get everything out, open the position, and mate with the pieces that are already there — and he had it at twelve, playing his father. Nine years later he beat Anderssen with the same idea, and the last game in this chapter is that. In between he was also mated in twelve moves, which is here too.

Chapter 5 7 games

Steinitz, and the end of the romantics

The man who argued the previous two chapters out of existence — and who spent his twenties playing exactly like them, which is what the first three games here are. The change is visible: by the last one he is winning by accumulating small things and the sacrifice arrives at the end as a receipt rather than as a bet.

Chapter 6 8 games

The king dragged into the open

A king that leaves its house is not usually mated where it stands — it is walked, square by square, to the middle of the board and mated there. Eight games about the same journey, in which the attacker is almost never the one who is a piece up.

Chapter 7 8 games

The queen, given away

The piece is worth nine pawns and in every one of these it is worth nothing, because the position had stopped being about material. Read them close together and the common thread is visible: in each, the queen is given to a square that a defender cannot leave.

Chapter 8 7 games

Two bishops, two rooks

The sacrifice that became a technique. Lasker gave away both bishops on h7 and g7 in 1889 and the idea has a name because of it; everything after is somebody doing the same thing knowingly, which is the difference between a brilliancy and a method.

Chapter 9 9 games

The immortals

The games that got a name of their own and kept it. There is no theme here beyond that, and the absence of one is the point: what these have in common is that a hundred years of players have agreed they are worth knowing.

Chapter 10 8 games

A world title, on the board

Eight games played for the championship of the world, where losing costs something — which is what makes them the hardest reading in this list. Nobody here is gambling. Every sacrifice was counted first.

Chapter 11 8 games

The Olympiad, Samarkand 2026

Eight games from the top boards of the 46th Olympiad, in September 2026, where Uzbekistan won the Open at home and China the Women’s. Nearly all of them were decided with somebody short of time, which is what team chess at this level is like: a knight check with three minutes left, a pawn taken at move forty, a rook ending that closed the event.