illness after one win, two draws, and two losses. He won a local tournament at the Café de la Régence in Paris in 1880. In 1882, he beat Wordsworth Donisthorpe in a match held at Simpson's Divan in London. Gossip's first significant success at over-the-board chess came at the 1883 London Vizayanagaram minor tournament. He scored 17½ out of 25, tying for fifth–sixth place out of 26 players with Charles Ranken, who later co-authored the treatise Chess Openings Ancient and Modern (1889). Curt von Bardeleben won with 21½ points; Isidor Gunsberg, who would narrowly lose an 1890–91 World Championship match to Steinitz, finished fourth with 19 points. In 1885 Gossip, a year after immigrating to Australia, issued a challenge to any player in the Australian colonies to play a match with him for 20 pounds a side and the title of Australian champion. Frederick Karl Esling, a leading Melbourne player, accepted the challenge. Esling won the first game, and the second was adjourned in a position favorable to him. Gossip then pleaded illness and forfeited the match. Kenneth Whyld writes that the Australians probably considered Gossip a "whingeing Pom". An Australian commentator observes, "Gossip may not have been the most popular itinerant to venture to these shores in the nineteenth century, but when he announced his challenge ... he at least brought the question of an official Chess Champion of Australia before the chess playing fraternity". In 1950, when Esling was 90, the Australian Chess Federation formally declared, belatedly, that he had become the first Australian Chess Champion by winning his 1885 match against Gossip. The Second Australian Chess Championship, a tournament, was held at Adelaide in 1887. Gossip finished third with 6½ out of 9, behind Henry Charlick (7½ points) and Esling (7 points). After returning to America in 1888, Gossip obtained an appointment at the Columbia Chess Club. The following year, he represented England at the Sixth American Chess Congress (New York 1889), one of the greatest tournaments of the 19th century. The Congress, a double round robin that was one of the longest tournaments in history, was intended to select a challenger for the world championship title. There, Gossip had what G. H. Diggle calls "perhaps the best performance of his career". He scored 13½ out of 38 (11 wins, 5 draws, 22 losses), finishing 17th–18th out of 20 players. He won games from S. Lipschütz, Max