Amos Burn

Amos Burn (31 December 1848 – 25 November 1925) was an English chess player, one of the world's leading players at the end of the 19th century, and a chess writer.

Burn was born on New Year's Eve, 1848, in Hull. As a teenager he moved to Liverpool, becoming apprenticed to a firm of shipowners and merchants. Aron Nimzowitsch, in his book The Praxis of My System, named Burn one of the world's six greatest defensive players.

Tournament history Burn's first tournament, in 1867–68, was a handicap tournament at the Liverpool Chess Club. Placed in the second level, where he received pawn-and-move odds from the four top-seeded players and gave odds of up to a knight to the other players, Burn won easily, scoring 24 out of 25 possible points. His first major tournament was the Third Challenge Cup of the British Chess Association (London 1870), where he surprised the pundits by tying for first with John Wisker, ahead of Joseph Henry Blackburne and others, but lost the playoff to Wisker. His last was Breslau 1912, where he finished 12th of 18 players, scoring 7.5 out of 17 possible points.

Burn's greatest tournament results were equal first at London 1887 with Isidor Gunsberg (ahead of Blackburne and Johannes Zukertort), first at Amsterdam 1889 (ahead of a young Emanuel Lasker), second at Breslau 1889 (behind Siegbert Tarrasch), and first at Cologne 1898 (ahead of Rudolf Charousek, Mikhail Chigorin, Carl Schlechter, David Janowski, and Wilhelm Steinitz). He also played at Hastings 1895, the strongest tournament held up to that point, finishing in joint twelfth place with 9½ points out of 21.

Legacy

Sample games

In one of Burn's last tournaments, he won as White against the young Alexander Alekhine:

Burn–Alekhine, Karlsbad 1911

Macdonald-Burn, Liverpool 1910

Burns' biographer Richard Forster calls the move "without doubt the most extraordinary of his career." noting that it is a rare example of the Novotny theme in practical play.