Paul Morphy beaten by.... THIS?!?!

Paul Morphy! How could such an esteemed chess player lose to this terrible defence???

Where the heck did you get Morphy's rating from? That must be fake, and that leads me to believe the game may be fake also?

I found it on this site. I was looking at the Barnes Defence on Game Explorer, and this game popped up as one of the games played with it.

thats not morphy!

Morphy has a 5-year peak rating as calculated by Elo. 2700 as I recall.

The game is legitimate and part of the match they played.

No this is real though probably not the rating. When I learned about the barnes defense it was called that because barnes used it to beat the great paul morphy but other than that it's quite bad.

Morphy was taking it heavy on the Vodka that night, or this fake...

Just my assumption.

This game was played in london in July 1958.

In the book Morphy's Games (by P.Sargeant pub by Dover)it is on page 239 under the chapter heading "casual games".

huh...

Sometimes people have bad games irrespective of how brilliant they are; why should Morphy be any different?

The style Barnes adopts in this game is the same as that explored in the book "Baroque Chess" (I forget the name of the author). The subtitle of the book was "How to beat your betters at chess." Sometimes the baroque style works. I have beaten one master (Jude Acers) and drawn another (Neal Harris) with the Saragossa opening, 1. c3. I followed with 2. d3, following notions similar to Barnes's f3 and e3. Sometimes the odd turtle-like defenses give the masters a chance to err.  

Morphy's rating is a joke.  They didn't have ratings back then and the 'supposed rating' is unrealistic and unofficial (an interesting hobby, nothing more) ... The game may very well have been real... no way to say for sure however.

I believe I've seen it before, weird game.

-matt

i think that it will mostly propably be a game of another paul mormpy who has the same name that's why he has a rating

No. It couldn't be. Look at the year it was played.

Why would it not be Morphy? Of course it is. Barnes wasn't a chump either, like some people here must believe.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1266586

The idea here was probably to throw Morphy out of his preferred lines and openings. Obviously, it worked.

Morphy, as most player at that time, had trouble against solid openings and closed defence.

 In Morphy's opinion, Barnes was the strongest English player he met.

As I recall, they met otb fairly soon after Morphy got off the boat, and as Morphy was a poor traveller, the results might have favored Barnes a bit. Anyway, his performance vs. Morphy was the best of any English players.

Every great Chess player has an off day why should Morphy be different?

Seems odd that he traded down so willingly when he was down on material, but this is definitely Morphy playing.

Barnes didn't even touch his queenside for 20 moves!