St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Deciding the Draw

DECIDING THE DRAW

ZUKERTORT AND STEINITZ MEET

FOR THE EIGHTH GAME OF THEIR SERIES

Progress of the Chess Party This Afternoon

Zukertort Opens with the Queen's Gambit

Which Steinitz Declines

Details of the Game

Mr. Steinitz, as usual, was early at the Harmonie club this afternoon, and seemed as eager to bring the chess match as his phlegmatic nature would allow. As he wandered through the corridors he was interrogated by a Post-Dispatch reporter as to his hope of success. Mr. Steinitz's round, florid face was widened somewhat by the smile that at once followed as he said, with but a slight foreign accent: "I am feeling ever so much better now. My fit of nervousness and insomnia, which rendered me an unworthy opponent in New York, has left me now and I feel that I am myself again. Of course I cannot tell when this trouble will attack me again, but I do know that at present I have the strongest hopes of winning. Why, in New York I was so unfit for playing that I wouldn't back myself. Indeed, Dr. Zukertort's friends will tell you that he did not outplay me in New York at all, but that my blunders were so wonderfully erratic that an insignificant player could have defeated me. These attacks of nervousness have been my bane before. In the Vienna tournament I was thirteenth at the end of the first week but pulled up and tied for first and second places."

Mr. Steinitz had read, with great anxiety, the Post-Dispatch accounts of the London riot and said he was eager to get at the evening paper to read the latest details, as he lived for twenty years in London and was afraid that the outbreak was a general communistic movement.

When the players began play at 2 o'clock promptly, there were an even dozen spectators,

The Smallest Audience

They have yet begun before. Among those twelve were Isador Judd, E.C. Simmons, Adolph Judd, Lewis Haller, S.M. Joseph, J.E. Martin of Toledo, Judge Woerner, Max Judd, E. Helke of Leadville, and Col. George Rowley. This gathering was gradually increased as the game proceeded. Dr. C.D.N. Campbell acted as umpire for Steinitz, and Mr. Isador Judd for Zukertort.

This, the ninth game of the series and the fourth in St. Louis, was opened by Zukertort who chose white and opened with the queen's gambit which Steinitz at once declined. This is the same opening Zukertort has chosen in all the games he has played in this series so far, and there was a little disappointment as the local players had been expecting something better. Both players were deliberate, and took things less nervously than formerly. The arrangements of timing this game were all right and the game proceeded quickly.