Charles Henry Stanley

Charles Stanley (left) and John Turner (right) during their competition in Washington 1850 - JJ Löwenthal as spectators

Charles Henry Stanley (born September 1819 in Brighton , England , † October 6, 1901 in New York City ) was an English-born American chess master and the first official champion of the USA.

Stanley was already a passionate chess player in England . In 1839 he beat Howard Staunton in London with 3.5: 2.5 (+3 = 1 −2) in a handicap competition , in which Staunton gave Bauer and Zug. Stanley entered the United States from England in 1842 and took up residence in New York City , where he worked at the British Consulate. He popularized the game of chess in the New World in various ways, so he was the first to edit a permanent chess column in the daily newspaper The Spirit of the Times (1845–1848), in which he published the first chess problem in the USA. In 1846 he published the first American chess magazine, the American Chess Magazine , which, however, had to be abandoned a year later due to economic difficulties. In the same year he published the book 31 Games of Chess , the first American book about a chess competition. In 1855 Stanley organized the world's first chess composition tournament.

In 1845 Stanley played against Eugène Rousseau in New Orleans for the first ever championship of the USA. Stanley won after 31 games with 19:12 (+15 = 8 −8) and became the first official champion of the USA. 8-year-old Paul Morphy , whose uncle was a second of Rousseau, was among the spectators of the competition . Paul Morphy took the title from Stanley in 1857 after his victory in the first US Congress in New York. The clear inferiority of Stanley was shown by the fact that he defended his US Championship against Morphy in a competition with a target from Zug and Bauer, but he was defeated 1: 4. The prize won in this competition was presented by Morphy Stanley's wife. In 1859 his books The Chess Player's Instructor and Morphy's Match Games were published . In 1860 Stanley traveled back to England, where he was second at the 3rd British Chess Congress after Ignaz von Kolisch in Cambridge that same year . In 1861 he won a tournament in Leeds . From 1860 to 1862 he headed chess columns in the Manchester Express and Guardian newspapers . Later he went back to the USA. In 1868 he was defeated by George Henry Mackenzie in a competition in New York.

Stanley suffered from alcoholism for the rest of his life . He spent the last 20 years of his life in various sanatoriums.

literature

• Chess Yearbook for 1899/1900 , Veit & Comp., Leipzig 1899, p. 225.
• David Hooper, Kenneth Whyld : The Oxford companion to chess , Oxford University Press, 2nd Edition 1996, p. 389.

Web links

• Playable chess games by Charles Henry Stanley on 365Chess.com (English)