1886: The Match That Created the World Chess Championship

Before the Championship: The Question of Who Was Best

For most of chess history, there was no formal mechanism for determining the world's best player. Strength was established informally through matches, tournaments, and reputation. The strongest players of the mid-nineteenth century — Paul Morphy of the United States, Howard Staunton of England, Adolf Anderssen of Germany — were acknowledged as dominant by consensus rather than by formal title.

Wilhelm Steinitz of Vienna (later an American citizen) was considered the world's strongest player from approximately 1866, when he defeated Adolf Anderssen in a match, and maintained this informal status for twenty years before the 1886 match with Johannes Zukertort finally formalized the championship. The match, played across multiple cities in the United States — New York, St. Louis, and New Orleans — was the first to carry the explicit designation of World Championship, and the first governed by a formal agreement specifying the stake, the format, and the winning condition (first to ten wins, draws not counting).

Steinitz won ten games to Zukertort's five, with five draws, claiming the title and establishing the concept of a defended world championship that remains central to competitive chess today.

Steinitz's Revolution: The Birth of Positional Chess

Steinitz's importance to chess history goes beyond being the first official world champion. He was the founder of what is called classical positional chess theory — a system of principles that transformed how the game was understood and played, and whose influence persists in every subsequent school of chess thought.

Before Steinitz, the dominant style was the "romantic" or "combinational" approach: games were won through brilliant tactical attacks, often involving dramatic sacrifices, with the initiative considered paramount regardless of material balance. Players aimed for sharp, explosive positions and considered cautious, solid play aesthetically inferior and practically weak.

Steinitz developed a systematic theory based on the accumulation and preservation of small positional advantages: control of the center, control of open files, the bishop pair, a well-placed knight, a weak opposing pawn, a safe king position. He argued that attack was only justified when sufficient positional advantages had been accumulated to support it, and that premature attack against a solid position was objectively bad regardless of its tactical complexity. He defended against sharp attacks with cool defensive play, accepting doubled pawns or other structural concessions if compensated by other advantages.

Seven Years as World Champion

Steinitz defended the title successfully until 1894, when he was defeated at the age of 58 by Emanuel Lasker — who would go on to hold the championship for the remarkable duration of 27 years, the longest reign in world championship history. Steinitz played two championship matches against Lasker and lost both, but the intellectual legacy of his positional theory survived and was systematized by his successors.

Siegbert Tarrasch, a German physician and chess master, became the primary systematizer and popularist of Steinitz's ideas, developing a series of maxims ("The knight belongs on c3," "Rooks belong on open files") that made positional principles accessible to a wider audience. These principles, sometimes called the Tarrasch school, dominated chess teaching for decades.

The subsequent hypermodern school of the 1920s — represented by Nimzowitsch, Réti, and others — challenged Steinitz's emphasis on central occupation, arguing that central control could be achieved indirectly through piece pressure rather than direct occupation. But even this revision was an argument within a framework that Steinitz had established. All modern chess theory — from classical to hypermodern to the computer-derived opening theory of the twenty-first century — is in dialogue with the first world champion's fundamental contribution: the idea that chess has underlying principles that can be systematically understood.

A Championship That Has Never Stopped

The World Chess Championship that Steinitz initiated in 1886 has continued uninterrupted through wars, political upheavals, and organizational disputes. The title passed through Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Euwe, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, and into the contemporary era of Kramnik, Anand, Carlsen, and Ding Liren. Each champion has brought a distinctive style and philosophical contribution, building on and revising the foundations that Steinitz laid in a match played across American cities nearly a hundred and forty years ago.