Tags: Chess Player.
Cecil Valentine De Vere (14 February 1845 Montrose – 9 February 1875 Torquay) was the pseudonym of Cecil Valentine Brown the winner of the first official British Chess Championship in 1866.He played chess effortlessly and elegantly without recourse to chess study or theory; in this respect he was not unlike José Raúl Capablanca. His meteoric rise to fame and equally dramatic decline has been compared to Paul Morphy and he is often cited as ‘The English Morphy’.