The Belfast Champion. Irish-born player famous for 85-game match against La Bourdonnais in 1834.
Alexander McDonnell was the strongest chess player in England and Ireland in the early 1830s, trading wins with the best players of his era. His fame rests almost entirely on the extraordinary 1834 match series against La Bourdonnais in London, six matches totalling 85 games, played over many months in the Westminster Chess Club. Despite losing the overall series, many of his games showed tremendous creativity and fighting spirit. He died just one year after the match in 1835, likely from diabetes, at only 37 years old.
Notable: Game 16 of the 1834 match, where McDonnell played the King's Gambit Accepted with stunning complications, is considered one of the masterpieces of Romantic chess.
| Era | Romantic |
| Years | 1798–1835 |
| Peak rating | 2480 |
| Born | Belfast, Ireland, 1798 |
| Title | Strongest English player (1830s) |
| Style | Tenacious defense, solid play, resourceful counterattack |
McDonnell, reconstructed from the player's own games and measured against a modern engine, as a UCI engine for your machine: it runs locally and offline, loads into CZUBATRONIC 2400 as an external engine, and into any compatible UCI chess interface. Strong chess from the engine; the choices, recognisably McDonnell's.
| File | ChessGate_McDonnell.exe · 21 MB |
| Runs in | CZUBATRONIC 2400 (as an external engine) and any UCI chess interface |
| Requirements | Windows 10 / 11, 64-bit; any UCI chess interface; CZUBATRONIC 2400 lists it as an external engine |
| Works offline | Yes. No account, no server. |
| Packs | — |
| Collection | Complete Personality Collection |
| In the browser | A lighter version of McDonnell plays on ChessGate. |
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