John Cochrane (chess player)
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 brought Napoleon Bonaparte to St. Helena. In April 1821 Cochrane was invited along with William Lewis to Paris to compete with the masters Alexandre Deschapelles and Louis -Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais. Both French proved to be stronger. A year later, Cochrane published his textbook Treatise on the Game of Chess.
In 1824 he finished his studies in law and was admitted to the bar. In the same year he was team leader in the competition correspondence between London and Edinburgh, but then left the UK to pursue his legal career in India. Before his departure, he dictated to one of the games the London correspondence chess opening moves 1.e2 the friends -e4 e7 - e5 2.Sg1 -f3 c6 3.d2 -d4 - Sb8. Without using the Cochrane London lost this game, and you made the opening responsible, but the Scots from Edinburgh applied this line of play in the next game itself and won again. Since that time Scottish game is this opening, although it was known since 1750 at the latest, called. The somewhat forgotten opening has been used since 1990 by Garry Kasparov repeated at the highest level and the modern game is on this again very popular.
Cochrane remained until 1869 in India and founded a club in Calcutta, whose best player he was. A race against the Indians Moheschunder Bannerjee he won in 1852 with 13:9 at three draws. From 1841 to 1843 he visited London for eighteen months, where he met with the best of British and European chess masters. He played several hundred games with Howard Staunton, from which the notation has received about a hundred games. While Staunton proved to be superior to him, Cochrane was able to keep in a competition against the French master Pierre Saint Amant 6-4 with one draw the upper hand. From 1870 onwards, Cochrane lived back in London and was, until shortly before his death daily guest at the St. George 's Chess Club, against his secretary Johann Jacob Loewenthal he played about 200 free games.
Cochrane was considered a particularly feisty player who preferred gambits. The Oxford companion to chess (1992 ) says about him: When the so-called romantic style ever existed, Cochrane has the right to be regarded as its founder.
After a particularly aggressive variant Cochrane is named in the Russian game: 1.e2 -e4 e7 - e5 -f3 2.Sg1 Ng8 - f6 d7 - d6 3.Sf3xe5 4.Se5xf7. Also, this invention Cochrane from 1848 found in modern chess echoes: the Bulgarian elite grandmaster Vesselin Topalov in Linares in 1999 she turned against Vladimir Kramnik to. The match 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 Catalogue of Writers on Chess (London 1822)