Atkins' best-ever result came at his first major international tournament, Hanover 1902. He finished third with 11.5/17 (8 wins, 7 draws and just 2 losses), behind David Janowski (13.5 points) and Harry Nelson Pillsbury (12 points), but ahead of Mikhail Chigorin and Frank Marshall, among others. Chessmetrics ranks Pillsbury number 2 in the world at the time; Chigorin had played matches for the World Chess Championship in 1889 and 1892, and Marshall and Janowski would go on to do so in 1907 and 1910, respectively. Although Atkins could at this point have considered making chess his career, he did not, and indeed played in no international tournaments for the next 20 years because "he 'never found it possible again to play'".