Relatively few details of his life are known. Only a few years after his death almost all information concerning his life, including dates of birth and death, were lost. Daniel Fiske traveled to Vienna between 1862 and 1863 and searched the archives of the city for some details about him, but in vain.
In 1870 Anton Baron Reissner (a founder of the Wiener Schachgesellschaft and collaborator of the Neue Berliner Schachzeitung) managed to discover some details of Allgaier’s life. Later it was discovered that some information was in memories of Karl Heinrich von Ritters Lang.
Allgaier was born in the Duchy of Wurttemberg, his mother tongue was the Swabian dialect. His father was employed at a monastery as a Hofmeister, the person, who, in those days, was in charge of the education of the children of the rich and noble families. Allgaier received a Catholic education and was directed by his father towards the study of theology.
Following a trip to Poland he learned chess from a Polish Jew and the game became his main interest at the expense of the study of theology. In 1798, he moved to Vienna and joined the army.
Towards the end of 1780, he won a match from which he earned 1500 florins and the reputation of Vienna’s best player. This allowed Allgaier access to the aristocratic circles of the capital where he gave chess lessons. He also became the teacher of the sons and brothers of the Emperor Francis II.
Since Allgaier was in the army, he participated in the Napoleonic wars between Austria and France. In 1809, he was employed in a field hospital, where he became ill with chronic asthma. Because of his asthma he was moved to Prague where he became an accountant at the military hospital. He returned to Vienna in 1816 where the Emperor gave him, for health reasons, a modest pension.
Always short of money, in order to make some additional, he played chess in the Cafes of Vienna. It was reported that Allgaier's style was brilliant and mainly focused on attacking and when he played, a crowd of spectators gathered.
Allgaier would accept the challenge of anyone and weaker players also received a short lesson. He also played hidden in the Turk, the chess Automaton in 1809. A game played that year by the Turk against Napoleon is attributed to Allgaier.
At the end of December 1822, he was admitted to the military hospital in Vienna and died a few days later of dropsy, an old term for the swelling of soft tissues due to the accumulation of excess water and known today as congestive heart failure.
Allgaier was familiar with the writing of Philidor, del Rio, Lolli and Ponziani, but mostly the former; he was later called the German Philidor. He had a particular preference for the K-side P-majority which he believed to be a decisive advantage since it can advance, as Philidor had taught, against the enemy’s castled King. Unlike Philidor, however, he did not think that after 1.e4 e5 the move 2.Nf3 was a mistake. Philidor believed that 2.Nf3 was wrong because it prevents the f2-pawn from advancing and supporting, if needed, the e5-pawn. The pieces, according to Philidor, were better developed behind the pawns and, consequently, the N had to be placed on e2 or f3, but only after the f-pawn was moved to f4.
A variation of the King's Gambit is named after Allgaier: 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 3.Nf3 g5 4.h4 g4 5.Ng5. After 5... h6 white must make a dubious but tricky N sacrifice with 6.Nxf7 which leads to a very tactical game. As with many unsound gambits, it may lead to some nice wins in rapid games (or against lower rated players) because white gets some attacking chances.
In 1903, at the gambit tournament held in Vienna the Allgaier Gambit was played 11 times and white scored +0 -8 =3...not good. Between them, Isidor Gunsberg and Georg Marco played the gambit nine times and both got a single draw to show for it.
Clearly the gambit is unsound, but in my database in games by players rated under 2200 white scored quite well as black's defense is not quite as easy in practice as the GM game results might suggest. However, if you’re playing a GM, the Allgaier should definitely be avoided.
By the end of the 19th century enthusiasm for romantic swashbuckling gambit play had disappeared and to revive interest, in 1903 the Vienna Chess Club sponsored a King’s Gambit tournament in which the moves 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 were mandatory. Albert Rothschild and Leopold Trebitsch provided the financial support. Then World Champion Emanuel Lasker predicted that black would win most of the games and his prediction proved true. White scored +32 -38 =20
Once the tournament was underway, the masters who favored positional play found themselves at the mercy of the aggressive tacticians like Chigorin and Marshall. Positional players like Schlechter, Maroczy and Teichmann finished outside the prize list. For Pillsbury this was his last European tournament as his fatal illness was approaching. See my post Pillsbury’s Syphilis
Chigorin of St. Petersburg, Russia, the chief living exponent of gambits emerged in first. The fact that Chigorin won didn’t surprise anyone, especially Marshall who wrote in My Fifty Years of Chess, “…coming second to Chigorin was no disgrace, for the old Russian had made a lifelong study of the King’s Gambit and had a deeper knowledge of this intricate opening than has ever been possessed by any other man.”
During the course of the tournament the London Sunday Special opined that “there is a tradition among leading tournament players that it is only necessary to comfront Chigorin with 1.d4 and Chigorin resigns.” The magazine then added that it was only necessary to compel his opponents to play and open game and would all resign. The Sunday Special also noted that the chess playing public preferred a “dashing and brilliant player to the patient accumulating of small minutiae” as advocated by Steinitz.
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