Chess

Chess is a board game that is played on a checkered board of sixty-four squares. The board is arranged into a grid of eight-by-eight squares. The game begins with both players holding sixteen pieces, which are arranged in two rows on either side of the board. Each player is given a king, a queen, two bishops, two rooks, two knights, and eight pawns. Each of these pieces move differently and have strategic strengths and weaknesses. The point of the game is to force an opponent into a checkmate, or the inability to move without their king being captured.

Brief History

Chess likely developed out of a similar game called chaturanga, which originated in India. The earliest known version of modern chess emerged in Persia during the fifth or sixth century CE and was called chatrang. Like modern chess, chatrang was played between two opponents on a board with sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces. Originally, the pieces were based on various divisions of the military—the king, his minister (now the queen), elephants (bishops), horses (knights), chariots (rooks), and foot soldiers (pawns). Unlike other games of the time, chaturanga and chatrang did not use dice or rely on chance and instead depended solely on strategy. After the Muslim conquest of Persia (633–654 CE), the game spread to Europe. The various moves of the different pieces reached their current form in Spain during the fifteenth century, and the modern rules of chess were close to fully developed by the year 1475.

During the eighteenth century, chess became increasingly popular in France, where noblemen and chess masters began to create chess clubs and began playing in coffee houses. Competitive chess also started to become increasingly well organized, and the first national and international chess tournaments were held in the mid-nineteenth century.

The first international chess tournament was organized by Howard Staunton, one of England’s leading chess players, and held in London in 1851. Adolf Anderssen, a German, won and was named the leading chess master. The Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), also known as the World Chess Federation, was established in Paris in 1924. FIDE oversees the annual World Chess Championship.

In the United States and the Soviet Union, chess took on heightened cultural and political importance during the Cold War, particularly the 1972 World Chess Championship (dubbed the "match of the century") between Bobby Fischer of the United States and Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union. Fischer beat Spassky, the defending champion, to become the first American born in the United States to claim the world title.

The development of computers capable of playing chess began in the 1950s. High-speed servers and complex algorithms that analyze all possible moves and assess their chances of success have proven to be more capable at winning games of chess than human grandmasters, such as when Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov, then the reigning world chess champion, was defeated by the computer program Deep Blue in 1997. Kasparov held the world record for the having the highest FIDE chess rating in history until he was surpassed in 2012 by Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, who surpassed his own record-high rating in 2014 and continued to hold this record well into the 2020s.

During the twenty-first century a number of high-profile chess tournaments were regularly held around the world. The most prominent tournament, the World Chess Championship, is held an average of every two to three years to determine the world champion in the game of chess. The World Chess Championship is operated and overseen by FIDE, which took over administration of the event starting with the 1948 World Chess Championship. Some champions of the twenty-first century included Carlsen, who held the title of world champion from 2012 to 2023, and Chinese chess grandmaster Ding Liren, who claimed the title in 2023 after defeating Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi.

Overview

Each player begins with sixteen pieces of one color, typically black or white. When the game begins, the pieces are arranged in two rows on either side of the board. A player’s eight pawns are lined up in the second row. In the first row, the rooks are placed in each corner, followed by (moving toward the center of the board) the knights and then the bishops. The queen starts in the middlemost square matching her color, and the king begins on the space beside the queen.

The player with the white or lighter-colored pieces moves first, and then each player moves one piece per turn. On each turn, a player moves one piece to either an unoccupied square or to a square occupied by the opponent’s piece. When a player moves a piece to an occupied square, the opponent’s piece is then "captured" and removed from the board. There is only one move in chess in which a player moves two of their own pieces in one move: When castling, a player moves their king two squares toward a rook and the rook is placed on the square over which the king passed. (Castling can only occur if neither the king nor the rook involved has yet been moved.)

Each type of piece has rules governing its movement. Unlike other pieces, pawns can only move forward. A pawn can advance one or two squares when it is first moved; on subsequent moves, a pawn can only advance one space. Pawns capture other pieces by advancing one space diagonally to occupy the same square as an opponent’s piece. The one exception to this rule is called en passant (French for "in passing"), which can only occur immediately after an opponent’s pawn has moved two spaces forward from its starting position to land beside the player’s pawn; the player can then move their pawn to the space behind the opponent’s pawn and capture the opponent’s pawn without occupying the same space. A pawn can be promoted to a rook, knight, bishop, or queen if it reaches the other side of the board without being captured.

Rooks can move any number of squares in either a horizontal or vertical direction across the board. Bishops can move any number of squares diagonally. A knight moves in an L-shape in which it first moves two squares (either horizontally or vertically) and then moves one square (either vertically or horizontally). The movement of knights in unique in that they can "jump over" other pieces occupying the first two squares of their movement. The queen is the most powerful piece on the board and can move any number of squares in any direction (horizontally, vertically, or diagonally). The king can move one square in any direction.

The object of the game is to place the opponent’s king in checkmate, which occurs when a player cannot make any moves that will take their king out of check. Check occurs when a king is in a position to be captured by an opponent’s piece. When a player’s king is in check, that player can only make a move that will take their king out of check (either by moving their king to a safe square, capturing the opponent’s piece that threatens to capture their king, or by placing another piece between their king and the opponent’s piece that threatens to capture their king).

In addition to checkmate, a game of chess can be won in two other ways: if the other player runs out of time in games with time control or if the other player resigns the game. A game of chess can also end in a draw. A player can call for a draw in six different situations: when both players agree that the game is over (called a "draw by agreement"); when there is a stalemate and there are no legal moves left (for instance, when a player’s king is not in check but the player cannot make any moves without placing their king in check); when the fifty-move rule is incurred (in which no pawns have been moved and no capture has been made in the past fifty turns); when there has been a threefold repetition of the same position ("draw by repetition"); or when there is insufficient material (or pieces) to achieve checkmate (for example, one king against one king and a knight or a bishop).

Bibliography

Chabris, Christopher. "The Real Kings of Chess Are Computers." The Wall Street Journal., 9 Jan. 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-kings-of-chess-are-computers-1420827071. Accessed 1 Jul. 2024.

"FIDE Handbook." World Chess Federation, handbook.fide.com. Accessed 1 Jul. 2024.

Fischer, Bobby, and Stuart Margulies. Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. New York: Bantam, 1972.

Just, Tim, ed. U.S. Chess Federation’s Official Rules of Chess. 6th ed. Random, 2014.

Murray, H. J. R. A History of Chess. Skyhorse, 2012.

Shenk, David. The Immortal Game: A History of Chess. Doubleday, 2006.

"World Champions Timeline." World Chess Federation, 2023, worldchampionship.fide.com/chess-champions. Accessed 1 Jul. 2024.