A thirteen-year-old gives up his queen, and the room goes quiet.

The game was played in the eighth round of a small invitational in a chess club in Manhattan, in October 1956. Byrne, twenty-six, had won the US Open three years earlier. Fischer, thirteen, had a draw against him from the year before and not much else anyone had noticed. The opening was quiet for ten moves. On the eleventh Byrne put his bishop on g5, a normal-looking move, and Fischer answered by sending a knight to the edge of the board, to a4, where it had no business being. It was the start of a combination that ran to the end of the game.

Six moves later came the move the game is named for. With his queen attacked, Fischer did not move it. He played his bishop to e6 and let Byrne take the queen. What he got for it was a rook, two bishops and a pawn, collected by a series of discovered checks that walked Byrne’s king back and forth between f1 and g1 while the knight ate what it liked. Hans Kmoch, writing it up for Chess Review, called it the game of the century, and wrote that for a boy of thirteen against an opponent of Byrne’s class it had no equal among the games of prodigies. The name stuck.

The rest is a hunt. Byrne’s queen was left on one side of the board, alone, while Fischer’s rook, bishops and knight closed in on the other. The story goes that Byrne played the last moves out so the people watching could see the mate, and it is worth seeing: the king is driven from g1 along the back rank to c1, each move a check, and the rook lands on c2. On the print the lines of that last walk are the short ones along the bottom edge; the long ones, across the whole board, are the bishops. A little over a year later Fischer was champion of the United States, at fourteen.