Game of the Century

The Game of the Century is Donald Byrne versus Bobby Fischer, played in the 1956 Lessing J. Rosenwald tournament in New York. Fischer was thirteen years old and had Black. That summer he had won the U.S. Junior Championship; Byrne had won the U.S. Open in 1953. Their meeting brought together two different stages of a chess career: a young player beginning to stand out and an opponent with established success beyond junior competition.

The game is remembered above all for 17...Be6, which leaves Black's queen available to the opposing bishop. Yet the sacrifice does not produce immediate mate. The checks allow Fischer to collect material without giving Byrne time to regroup; that advantage then has to be converted. White's queen remains in play, but it cannot stop Black's pieces working together. The victory culminates in checkmate on move 41, not in the capture of the queen.

The Rosenwald was a twelve-player invitation tournament. Fischer finished with 4.5 points from eleven games, while Samuel Reshevsky won the event. The win over Byrne received the first brilliancy prize. The prize and the standings recognized different things: the quality of a single game and performance across the whole competition.

Hans Kmoch presented it as the “Game of the Century” in the December 1956 issue of Chess Review. His praise explicitly concerned the history of chess prodigies. The name preserves the contemporary excitement at what so young a player had achieved; it is not an objective ranking of every game played in the century.