New Zealand Championship Chess Tournament

30 January, 1897

Papers Past

The ‘Ruy Lopez’ (e4 e5; Nf3 Nc6; Bb5) was quite a popular opening for many players. Here it is used to start a game between Dunedin chess members J. Edwards and Mellor. Mellor was perhaps a ‘soft-touch’. While living at Lincoln, Canterbury, in 1898, he played and beat an elderly gentleman named Black. To his wife Emma he wrote: ‘Next time I play an old man I shall take care that he wins the last game & that he does not know that I have let him.’ Of decimating his opponent he said: ‘I felt like a great coward.’