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Chess historians have also painted Vienna 1873 as a coming-out party for Steinitz’s more modern approach to the game, a more analytical, theory-based approach to play compared to the swashbuckling “Romantic” attack-at-all-costs style favored by Anderssen and his peers.

The event proved a triumph for the Prague-born, London-based Wilhelm Steinitz, who built on his narrow match win over German star Adolf Anderssen seven years earlier to cement his status as the first “official” world champion, a title he would hold for another 21 years.

Anderssen, a professor of mathematics, traveled to Paris on his year-end break to play the match, including two lively encounters played on Dec. 25.

There’s been some excellent revisionist history about the Anderssen match and about the roots of Morphy’s greatness more generally.

Contrary to the neat, simplistic fairy tale told by Richard Reti and others, Romantic Era masters like Anderssen understood perfectly well the need for piece development and control of the center, the tradeoff between time and material, and the way to translate a positional advantage into a tactical opportunity.