Amos Burn

Amos Burn
Amos Burn
Full name	Amos Burn
Country	England
Born	31 December 1848 Kingston upon Hull, England
Died	25 November 1925 London, England

Amos Burn (1848–1925) was an English chess player, one of the world's leading players at the end of the 19th century, and a chess writer.

Burn was born on New Year's Eve, 1848, in Hull. As a teenager, he moved to Liverpool, becoming apprenticed to a firm of shipowners and merchants. He learned chess only at the relatively late age of 16. He later took chess lessons from future World Champion Wilhelm Steinitz in London, and, like his teacher, became known for his superior defensive ability.Aron Nimzowitsch, in his book The Praxis of My System, named Burn one of the world's six greatest defensive players.

Although never a professional chess player, Burn had a long tournament and writing career.

In 1913, Leopold Hoffer, the editor for over 30 years of the chess column in The Field, the leading chess column in Great Britain, died. The proprietors of The Field took seven weeks to select a successor, finally settling on Burn. He moved to London and wrote the column until his death in 1925.

His first tournament, in 1867–68, was a handicap tournament at the Liverpool Chess Club. Placed in the second level, where he received pawn and move odds from the four top-seeded players, and gave up to knight odds to the other players, Burn won easily, scoring 24 out of 25 possible points. Burn's first major tournament was the Third Challenge Cup of the British Chess Association (London 1870), where he surprised the pundits by tying for first with John Wisker, ahead of Joseph Henry Blackburne and others, but lost the playoff to Wisker. His last was Breslau 1912, where he finished 12th of 18 players, scoring 7.5 out of 17 possible points.

Burn's greatest tournament results were equal first at London 1887 with Isidor Gunsberg (ahead of Joseph Henry Blackburne and Johannes Zukertort), first at Amsterdam 1889 (ahead of a young Emanuel Lasker), second at Breslau 1889 (behind Siegbert Tarrasch), and first at Cologne 1898 (ahead of Rudolf Charousek, Mikhail Chigorin, Carl Schlechter, David Janowski, and Steinitz). He also played at Hastings 1895, the strongest tournament held up to that point, finishing in joint twelfth place with 9½ points out of 21.

...
Wikipedia