Jean Dufresne (14 February 1829 – 13 April 1893)
was a German
chess
Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to dist ...
player and
chess composer
A chess composer is a person who creates endgame studies or chess problems. Chess composers usually specialize in a particular genre, e.g. endgame studies, twomovers, threemovers, moremovers, helpmates, selfmates, fairy problems, or retrogr ...
. He was a student of
Adolf Anderssen
Karl Ernst Adolf Anderssen (July 6, 1818 – March 13, 1879)"Anderssen, Adolf" in ''The New Encyclopædia Britannica''. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 15th edn., 1992, Vol. 1, p. 385. was a German chess master. He won the great internat ...
, to whom he lost the "
Evergreen game
The Evergreen Game is a famous chess game won by Adolf Anderssen against Jean Dufresne in 1852.
This was probably an . At the time, there was no formal title of "World Champion", but the German mathematics professor Anderssen was widely conside ...
" in 1852.
Life
Dufresne was born and died in
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...
.
The son of a wealthy Jewish businessman, he attended law school but was forced to abandon his studies when his father ran into financial difficulties. He subsequently became a journalist.
Dufresne was an unsuccessful novelist under the anagrammatic pseudonym E. S. Freund, but wrote several chess books, one of which, ''Kleines Lehrbuch des Schachspiels'' (1881, known in Germany as ''Der Kleine Dufresne''
) ran to many editions and taught several generations of players. In a letter to Paul Dirac at the end of 1929, Werner Heisenberg deemed Dufresne's handbook "the best book about theory of Chess". He also wrote a popular book on Paul Morphy.
His grave is located in the Jewish Cemetery Berlin-Weißensee.
Tour of Berlin and Kórnik, preview
Notable games
Dufresne took first in the ''Berliner Schachgesellschaft'' in 1853
See also
* List of chess games
References
External links
*
1829 births
1893 deaths
19th-century German Jews
German chess players
Jewish chess players
German chess writers
Chess composers
German male non-fiction writers
Writers from Berlin
19th-century chess players
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