The Chinese Immortal
A sixteen-year-old gives his rook on f7 and drags the enemy king across the entire board — the first game hailed as an immortal of the twenty-first century.
Wei, Yi against Bruzon Batista, Lazaro · 6th Hainan Danzhou GM · 2015.07.03 · 1–0
The story behind it
Danzhou, on the island of Hainan, hosts one of China's strongest invitation tournaments, and in July 2015 its second round paired the national champion — sixteen-year-old Wei Yi, already the youngest 2700 in history — against Cuba's Lazaro Bruzón, a former World Junior Champion. Out of a quiet Sicilian, Bruzón castled into what looked like an ordinary kingside and played the standard freeing moves. Nothing about the position warned of what was coming.
Then came 22.Rxf7. The rook simply lands on the shield in front of the king, and everything that follows is forced marching: the king takes, because it must; the queen's check on h7 pulls it to e6; a pawn check drags it to d5; and then a second sacrifice, 25.Be4+, invites it to the very centre of the board. Bruzón declined nothing because declining lost faster. Two pieces down, Wei Yi then played the move the game is studied for — 26.Qf7, no check, no capture, a door closing softly. The king stood on e4 with nowhere to go and no way back.
What followed was a hunt of rare purity: eighteen moves in which Black's extra material sat on the queenside, spectating, while the king was walked — e4, f5, g4, h4, h3 and back — through the white army's own camp. Every black try was met; the one check Bruzón managed was absorbed in two moves. It ended on move forty with the queen taking the bishop that was the king's last shelter: mate on h4, the full width of the board from where the king had castled.
ChessBase's report called it an immortal before the tournament was over, and the name held. The twentieth century opened its anthology with Anderssen's sacrifices; the twenty-first, by growing consensus, opens with a Chinese teenager's rook on f7.
The moments
Click one — the board above jumps there.
The players
in the archive
Wei Yi
The youngest player ever to cross 2700, at fifteen, and the youngest Chinese national champion. This game, played at sixteen, made him world-famous overnight — a king hunt calculated to the end through quiet moves as well as checks.
in the archive
Lazaro Bruzón
World Junior Champion in 2000 and many times champion of Cuba, one of the strongest Latin American players of his generation. His defence was reasonable at every single moment — which is exactly what makes the game immortal.
The score
The moves are history's; we checked them against it.
ECO B40 · our PGN header reads Date 2015.07.03
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