The 16 contestants in alphabetical order were as below the ( ) number shows their age at the time of the tournament:
(50- Adolf Albin - Bucharest, Romania 1848-1920
(53- Johann Nepomuk Berger - Graz, Austria 1845-1933
(50- Amos Burn - Hull, England 1848-1925
(25- Rudolf Charousek - Klein-Lometz near Prague, Czechoslovakia 1873-1900
(48- Mikhail Ivanovich Chigorin - Gatchina/Petersburg, Russia 1850-1908
(43- Wilhelm Cohn - Berlin, Germany 1855-1913
(41- Alexander Fritz - Kirchlotheim, Germany 1857-1932
(36- Herman von Gottschall - Posen, Poland 1862-1933
(22- Arved Heinrichsen - Vilnius, Lithuania 1876-1900
(30- David Markelovicz Janowsky - Wolkowysk, Poland 1868-1927
(35- Ignatz von Popiel - Lvov, Russia 1863-1941
(55- Emil Schallopp - Freisack in der Mark, Germany 1843-1919
(48- Emanuel Stepanovich Schiffers - Petersburg, Russia 1850-1904
(24- Carl Schlechter - Vienna, Austria 1874-1918
(38- Jackson Whipps Showalter - Minerva, Kentucky USA 1860-1935
(62- Wilhelm Steinitz - Prague, Czechoslovakia 1836-1900
The youngest was 22 years old with the oldest being Steinitz at 62. If you compare that to modern top flight ages you can surely say that top players were much older in the 19th century compared to today.
The tournament was a 15 Round Robin tournament where everyone played everyone once. It lasted 18 days starting on August 2nd 1898 to August 19, 1998.
The final standings were as follows:
01 Burn - 11.5 Points
02 Charousek - 10.5
03 Chigorin - 10.5
04 Cohn - 10.5
05 Steinitz - 9.5
06 Schlechter - 9.0
07 Showalter - 9.0
08 Berger - 8.0
09 Janowsky - 7.5
10 Popiel - 7.0
11 Schiffers - 7.0
12 Gottschall - 5.5
13 Albin - 4.0
14 Heinrichsen - 4.0
15 Fritz - 3.5
16 Schallopp - 3.0
So 50 year old Englishman Amos Burn smashed this top flight competition by 1 whole point after 15 rounds dropping only 3.5 points which is a performance of 76.7%!
Not bad for a 50 year old! There is still hope for us all!
Fascinating is that mysteriously all the game notations disappeared after the tournament. Only 54 complete and partially complete games were ever found out of a total of 120 games played. These were found through more than a 100 years of laborious research into people collections and reading worldwide newspaper clippings of that period for any published games.
So what happened? As quoted in the book:
The British Chess Magazine suggested:
"The English belief that the Germans intended to eliminate in some way the 1898 Cologne Congress from the history of chess because the first prize had been won by an Englishman A. Burn"
"Deutsches Wochenschach, identified the offhand game lost by Burn as a game from the tournament. No-one can explain now how this mistake could have been made but it cannot have been bad intention because in the magazine on p. 32 it was explicitly stated that the game in the tournament ended in a draw"
"The August issue of the British Chess Magazine returned to that event and its note is based on Dr. Tarrasch's contemptuous remark about shortage of grand masters in England. He asks why no tournament volume was published about the Cologne congress and why Bilguer, when presenting the history of international congresses up to the present time, never mentioned Cologne 1898, and why in German books the illusion survives that the offhand game played in Cologne by Burn and Charousek and lost by Burn was their tournament match."
Anyway apparently Bilguer's Handbuch was read by a man on the staff of the British Chess Magazine in a perfunctory way only. The Cologne Congress, with Burn as its winner, is mentioned on page 122, column 2, line 8!
LOL that's funny such a prestigious tournament with World Class Players gets a line 8 mention!!
Still quoting the book:
"Well apparently the failure to publish the tournament volume can also be explained in a natural way. Dr. Max Lange, the then Chairman of the Association took the tournament scores with him assuring everybody they would soon be published in a splendid tournament book. Unfortunately, he was already incapable of doing this work, which is not surprising for those who knew him between 1896 and 1898. He was already mentally ill. When he died in 1899, the Cologne scores disappeared and no one knows what happened to them."
Wow what a mystery and international intrigues. Was it an accident? Was it deliberate? Sounds like a perfect story for Fernando's next book!
What I find fascinating is people like Amos Burns. A shipping and trading merchant in Liverpool who had to earn his living from around the age of 14, who learned to play chess at the age of 16. Yet, still had the ability in his spare time to compete with the top players of the world and beat professional players such as World Champion Steinitz.
It is people like Burn and Milan Vidmar a doctor in engineering and inventor, so busy in other fields yet world class in their hobby. I wonder what they would have achieved as professional chess players?
Well if someone finds the missing Cologne 1898 games, you will probably make a fortune selling them to a collector and what a mystery will it ever be solved?
Best regards
