1836-1842, First steps in chess

In 1836 Staunton came to London, where he took out a subscription for William Greenwood Walker's Games at Chess, actually played in London, by the late Alexander McDonnell Esq. Staunton was apparently twenty-six when he took a serious interest in chess. He said that at that time the strongest players he saw in London, Saint-Amant and George Walker, could easily have given him rook odds In 1838 he played many games with Captain Evans, inventor of the Evans Gambit, and also lost a match against the German chess writer Aaron Alexandre. He had improved sufficiently by 1840 to win a match against the German master H.W. Popert,[3] a slow, cautious player with great defensive skill.
From May to December 1840 Staunton edited a chess column for the New Court Gazette. He then became chess editor of the magazine British Miscellany, and his chess column developed into a separate magazine, Chess Player's Chronicle, which Staunton owned and edited until the early 1850s.