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Portrait of Chess

General knowledge · Culture & customs

Chess

Modern rules settled c. 1475–1500

Games — the board game of kings

A two-player board game on eight-by-eight squares, descended from the Indian game chaturanga by way of the Persian shatranj, and reshaped in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century when the queen and bishop gained their modern, long-range powers. Its vocabulary is a fossil record of that journey: "checkmate" comes from the Persian shāh māt, and "rook" from rukh, a chariot. The international federation FIDE was founded in Paris in 1924, though the first universally recognised world champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, had claimed the title in 1886.

How to spot them

  • ▸Sixty-four squares, sixteen pieces a side, and a light square at each player's right hand
  • ▸Words from Persian and Sanskrit: checkmate, rook, the elephant that became a bishop
  • ▸Special moves: castling, en passant, promotion; draws by stalemate, repetition and the fifty-move rule
  • ▸Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Fischer, Kasparov, Carlsen

Key facts

Descended from the Indian game chaturanga, by way of the Persian shatranj

Chaturanga is also ancestor to xiangqi, shogi and janggi

'Checkmate', from the Persian shāh māt — the king is helpless

And 'rook' from rukh, a chariot, not a castle or a bird

Around 1475 the queen became the strongest piece, in a version nicknamed alla rabiosa (c. 1475)

'Mad queen' or 'madwoman's' game, spreading from Spain and Italy with the printing press

Wilhelm Steinitz claimed the first universally recognised world title in 1886 (1886)

FIDE took over the running of the championship in 1948

In 1997 an IBM machine beat a reigning world champion 3½–2½ (1997)

Deep Blue against Garry Kasparov, in New York

Governed since 1924 by a Paris-founded body whose motto is Gens una sumus (1924)

'We are one family'; it was recognised by the IOC in 1999, though the game has never been an Olympic sport

Twelfth-century walrus-ivory pieces found in a sandbank in the Outer Hebrides (Found 1831)

The Lewis chessmen, probably made in Norway, split between the British Museum and National Museums Scotland

Key ideas

  • The fifteenth-century rule changes — the long-range queen and bishop — turned a slow game of manoeuvre into a fast, tactical one, and are why medieval games and modern ones barely resemble each other.
  • The Shannon number, about 10¹²⁰, is Claude Shannon's rough estimate of the number of possible games — far more than the atoms in the observable universe.

Quick-fire facts

  • •Its ancestor is chaturanga, played in India by around the 7th century, which passed to Persia as shatranj and then to Europe via the Arab world
  • •'Checkmate' derives from the Persian shāh māt, 'the king is helpless'; 'rook' from rukh, a chariot
  • •The queen and bishop gained their modern moves in Europe around 1475; the new game was nicknamed scacchi alla rabiosa
  • •FIDE was founded in Paris in 1924; its motto is Gens una sumus, 'We are one family'
  • •Wilhelm Steinitz became the first undisputed world champion in 1886; FIDE has organised the championship since 1948
  • •Deep Blue's defeat of Garry Kasparov in 1997 was the first match win by a computer over a reigning champion at classical time controls
  • •Magnus Carlsen holds the highest rating ever recorded, 2882, reached in 2014 and again in 2019
  • •Gukesh Dommaraju of India became the youngest undisputed world champion in 2024, aged 18
  • •The fastest possible checkmate, Fool's Mate, takes two moves; the fifty-move rule allows a draw claim after 50 moves with no capture or pawn move
  • •The Immortal Game (Anderssen–Kieseritzky, London 1851) is the most celebrated brilliancy in the game's history
  • •The Lewis chessmen, found on the Isle of Lewis in 1831, are the best-known medieval European pieces

Drill it — 10 cards

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Sources