John Cochrane (chess player)

John Cochrane
Association	United Kingdom
Born	4th February 1798 Scotland
Died	March 2, 1878 London
Best Elo rating	2571 (January 1843) ( historical rating )

John Cochrane (born February 4, 1798 in Scotland , † March 2, 1878 in London ) was a British chess master of the 19th century.

In 1815 he was an ensign on the Bellerophon , the ship that Napoleon Bonaparte brought to St. Helena . In April 1821, Cochrane was invited to Paris with William Lewis to compete with the masters Alexandre Deschapelles and Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais . Both French turned out to be stronger. A year later, Cochrane published his textbook Treatise on the Game of Chess .

In 1824 he finished his law studies and was admitted to the bar. In the same year he was team leader in the correspondence competition between London and Edinburgh , but then left Great Britain to pursue his legal profession in India . Before leaving, he dictated the opening moves 1. e2 – e4 e7 – e5 2. Ng1 – f3 Nb8 – c6 3. d2 – d4 to one of the correspondence games to his London chess friends . Without Cochrane's help, the Londoners lost this game, and the opening was blamed for it, but the Scots from Edinburgh used this sequence in the next game and won again. Since then, this opening has been known as the Scottish Part , although it was known since 1750 at the latest . The somewhat forgotten opening has been used repeatedly since 1990 by Garry Kasparov at the highest modern level of play and is very popular again on this level.

Cochrane stayed in India until 1869 and founded a club in Calcutta , of which he was the best player. He won a competition against the Indian Moheschunder Bannerjee in 1852 with 13: 9 in three draws. From 1841 to 1843 he visited London for eighteen months, where he met with the best British and European chess masters. He played several hundred games with Howard Staunton , of which the notation of about a hundred games has been preserved. While Staunton proved to be superior to him, Cochrane was able to keep the upper hand 6: 4 in a draw against the French champions Pierre Saint Amant . From 1870 Cochrane lived again in London and was a daily guest at St. George's Chess Club until shortly before his death , against whose secretary Johann Jacob Löwenthal he played around 200 free games.

Cochrane was considered a particularly aggressive player who preferred gambits . The Oxford companion to chess (1992) said about him: If the so-called romantic style ever existed, Cochrane is entitled to be considered its founder .

A particularly aggressive variant in the Russian game is named after Cochrane : 1. e2 – e4 e7 – e5 2. Ng1 – f3 Ng8 – f6 3. Nf3xe5 d7 – d6 4. Ne5xf7 . This invention by Cochrane from 1848 also found an echo in modern chess: the Bulgarian elite grandmaster Wesselin Topalow used it in Linares 1999 against Vladimir Kramnik . The game ended in a draw.

Works

• John Cochrane: A Treatise on the Game of Chess: Containing the Games on Odds, from the "Traité Des Amateurs;" the Games of the Celebrated Anonymous Modenese; a Variety of Games Actually Played; and a Catalog of Writers on Chess (London 1822)

literature

• Alfred Diel : Play on attack without hesitation. In: Kaissiber 23 (2006), pp. 68-69.

Web links

• Nikolay Minev: The Legacy of John Cochrane (2005) ( Memento from July 8, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (English; PDF file; 158 kB)