52 Facts About Paul Morphy

Paul Charles Morphy was an American chess player.

Paul Morphy won the tournament of the First American Chess Congress of 1857, winning matches with each opponent by lopsided margins.

Paul Morphy played formal and informal matches with most of the leading English and French players, and others including Adolf Anderssen of Germany, again winning all matches by large margins.

Paul Morphy then returned to the United States, and before long abandoned competitive chess.

Commentators agree that Paul Morphy was far ahead of his time as a chess player, though there is disagreement on how his play, and his natural talent, rank compared to modern players.

Paul Morphy was born in New Orleans to a wealthy and distinguished family.

Paul Morphy grew up in an atmosphere of genteel civility and culture where chess and music were the typical highlights of a Sunday home gathering.

Sources differ about when and how Paul Morphy learned how to play chess.

In 1845, Ernest acted as the second for Eugene Rousseau in Rousseau's match with Charles H Stanley, and Paul was taken along.

Paul Morphy easily won both of their two games, the second time after only six moves.

In 1850, when Paul Morphy was twelve, the strong professional Hungarian chess master Johann Lowenthal visited New Orleans.

Each time Paul Morphy made a good move, Lowenthal's eyebrows shot up in a manner described by Ernest Paul Morphy as "comique".

Paul Morphy then stayed on an extra year, studying mathematics and philosophy.

Paul Morphy was awarded an AM degree with the highest honors in May 1855.

Not yet of legal age to begin the practice of law, Paul Morphy found himself with free time.

Paul Morphy received an invitation to participate in the First American Chess Congress, to be held in New York from October 6 to November 10,1857.

Paul Morphy defeated each of his rivals, including James Thompson, Judge Meek, and two strong German masters, Theodor Lichtenhein and Louis Paulsen, the latter two in the semifinal and final rounds.

Paul Morphy was hailed as the chess champion of the United States, but he appeared unaffected by his sudden fame.

Daniel Fiske recruited Paul Morphy to be co-editor of his Chess Monthly, starting in early 1858 after the Congress, and Paul Morphy held the position until the end of 1860.

Up to this time, Paul Morphy was not well known or highly regarded in Europe.

Paul Morphy returned to his home city with no further action.

Staunton made an official reply through The Illustrated London News stating that it was not possible for him to travel to the United States and that Paul Morphy must come to Europe if he wished to challenge him and other European chess players.

Paul Morphy made numerous attempts at setting up a match with Staunton, but none ever came through.

Paul Morphy remained resolutely opposed to playing chess for money, reportedly due to family pressure.

At the Cafe de la Regence in Paris, the center of chess in France, Paul Morphy soundly defeated resident chess professional Daniel Harrwitz.

Anderssen attested that in his opinion, Paul Morphy was the strongest player ever to play the game, even stronger than the famous French champion La Bourdonnais.

Paul Morphy played a well-known casual game against the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard at the Italian Opera House in Paris.

Still only 21 years old, Paul Morphy was now quite famous.

Paul Morphy offered to play a match with Harrwitz, giving odds of pawn and move, and even offered to find stakes to back his opponent, but the offer was declined.

Paul Morphy then declared that he would play no more formal matches, with anyone, without giving at least those odds.

In Europe, Paul Morphy was generally hailed as world chess champion.

In Paris, at a banquet held in his honor on April 4,1859, a laurel wreath was placed over the head of a bust of Paul Morphy, carved by the sculptor Eugene-Louis Lequesne.

Paul Morphy was declared by St Amant "the first Chess player in the whole world".

At a similar gathering in London, where he returned in the spring of 1859, Paul Morphy was again proclaimed "the Champion of the Chess World".

At a simultaneous match against five masters, Paul Morphy won two games against Jules Arnous de Riviere and Henry Edward Bird, drew two games with Samuel Boden and Johann Jacob Lowenthal, and lost one to Thomas Wilson Barnes.

Paul Morphy's celebrity drew manufacturers who sought his endorsements, newspapers asked him to write chess columns, and a baseball club was named after him.

Paul Morphy was engaged to write a series of chess columns for the New York Ledger, which started in August of 1859.

Paul Morphy did not immediately cease playing serious chess; for example, on a visit to Cuba in 1864 he played a number of games with leading players of that country, including Celso Golmayo, the champion, all at odds of a knight.

Paul Morphy had not done so by 1861 at the outbreak of the American Civil War.

Paul Morphy was unable to successfully build a law practice after the war ended in 1865.

Financially secure thanks to his family's fortune, Paul Morphy essentially spent the rest of his life in idleness.

In 1875, his mother, brother and a friend tried to admit him to a Catholic sanitarium, but Paul Morphy was so well able to argue for his rights and sanity that they sent him away.

The Paul Morphy mansion, sold by the family in 1891, later became the site of the restaurant Brennan's.

Fine wrote that Paul Morphy "arranged women's shoes into a semi-circle around his bed", and this has been widely copied and embellished upon.

Now we come to the room which Paul Morphy occupied, and which was separated from his mother's by a narrow hall.

Paul Morphy's room was always kept in perfect order, for he was very particular and neat, yet this room had a peculiar aspect and at once struck the visitor as such, for Paul Morphy had a dozen or more pairs of shoes of all kinds which he insisted in keeping arranged in a semi-circle in the middle of the room, explaining with his sarcastic smile that in this way, he could at once lay his hands on the particular pair he desired to wear.

Paul Morphy approached the game more seriously than even the strongest of his contemporaries; as Anderssen noted,.

Paul Morphy played quickly; in an era before time control was used, he often took less than an hour to make all of his moves, while his opponents would need perhaps eight hours or more.

Paul Morphy noted that "Morphy and Capablanca had enormous talent", and stated that Morphy had the talent to beat any player of any era if given time to study modern theory and ideas.

Paul Morphy was so far ahead of his rivals that it is hard to find really outstanding examples of his skill.

Garry Kasparov, Viswanathan Anand, and Max Euwe argued that Paul Morphy was far ahead of his time.

Paul Morphy is frequently mentioned in Walter Tevis's novel The Queen's Gambit and its 2020 Netflix eponymous adaptation, as the favorite player of the main character, a chess prodigy named Beth Harmon.