Chess is older than the rules it is played by, and most of what everyone knows about it turns out to carry a twist. These stories run from a Persian phrase that does not mean what people think, through a world title settled across three American cities, to a program that was handed the rules and nothing else and taught itself the rest.
Every tile in a Chess game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Champions
nine stories
1The first world title was settled in three cities
On the tile: Steinitz1886
Wilhelm Steinitz and Johannes Zukertort sat down in New York in January 1886 to decide who was the strongest player alive, and then the match packed up and moved. Five games were played in New York, four in Saint Louis and the last eleven in New Orleans. Steinitz lost four of the first five games and still won, ten wins to five. Historians count it as the first official world championship. He held the title until Emanuel Lasker took it in 1894.
2Twenty-seven years champion, and an algebra pioneer
On the tile: Emanuel Lasker1894-1921
Emanuel Lasker took the world title in 1894 and did not give it up until 1921, the longest run any recognized champion has managed. Chess was not his only board. Advised by Max Noether, he submitted a doctoral thesis at Erlangen in 1900, and in 1905 he introduced the notion of a primary ideal. Emmy Noether built on that work to turn ring theory into a major branch of mathematics. Algebra students meet his name without knowing he was world champion.
José Raúl Capablanca played so cleanly that he was known as a chess machine. The FIDE museum records that he lost only 34 games in his entire adult career, and that from 1916 to 1924 he did not lose a single serious game at all. That run covered the 1921 match in which he took the world title from Emanuel Lasker without one defeat: four wins, ten draws, nothing else. Alexander Alekhine finally beat him for the crown in 1927.
4An amateur schoolteacher won the world championship
On the tile: Max Euwe1935
Max Euwe never turned professional. FIDE describes him as a chess amateur, a doctor of mathematics and a teacher, and in 1935 he challenged Alexander Alekhine for the world title. The match traveled: thirty games over eighty days in thirteen Dutch cities, from Amsterdam and Rotterdam out to Ermelo and Zandvoort. Euwe won it 15.5 to 14.5. Alekhine took the title back two years later, and Euwe went on to serve as president of FIDE from 1970 to 1978.
Vera Menchik became the first women's world champion in 1927 and held the title for seventeen years. Her eight world championship wins are still the most anyone has taken. She also entered tournaments against the leading men, and she beat them. Masters who lost to her were said to have joined the Vera Menchik Club, whose membership included Max Euwe, a future world champion, and the American Samuel Reshevsky. At Ramsgate in 1929 she tied for second, ahead of her own teacher, Géza Maróczy.
Vasily Smyslov had a powerful baritone and a serious ambition to use it. He tried out at the Bolshoi Opera and came close to being accepted, and when that door stayed shut he gave chess everything. In 1957 he beat Mikhail Botvinnik in Moscow, 12.5 to 9.5, and became world champion. Botvinnik won the title back in a rematch the following year. Smyslov never stopped singing, and at 75 he produced his first record of Russian romances.
Nona Gaprindashvili of Georgia held the women's world championship for fifteen years, but the title that made history came at the end of that run. In 1978 FIDE awarded her the grandmaster title, the first woman to receive it. In the same year she lost the women's crown in Tbilisi to a seventeen-year-old fellow Georgian, Maia Chiburdanidze. She gained the higher title in the very season she surrendered the other, and stayed among the world's best for another twenty years.
8She skipped the women's title and played everyone
On the tile: Judit Polgár1991-2005
Judit Polgár became a grandmaster in 1991 at fifteen years and four months, younger than anyone had managed before her. She then spent her career in open tournaments rather than women's events. The FIDE commission for women's chess records her peak at number eight in the world in 2004 and a rating of 2735 in 2005, and counts eleven current or former world champions among the players she has beaten at rapid or classical chess.
The 2023 world championship in Astana went the whole distance. Ding Liren and Ian Nepomniachtchi finished their fourteen classical games level, and the title came down to four rapid tiebreak games. Ding declined a draw by repetition in the last one and won it with the black pieces to become the seventeenth world champion. The FIDE president spelled out what it meant: for the first time in history, the world champion in the open category came from China.
Pawns have been allowed a two-square first move since about 1200, and that began an argument lasting six centuries. If a pawn sprinted past a waiting enemy pawn, had it escaped? England said no: the enemy could take it in passing, as though it had moved only one square. Italy and Germany said yes and refused the capture altogether, which changed their opening theory. Two versions of chess were still in use in the early nineteenth century.
Castling grew out of the medieval king's leap, which let the king jump two squares in any direction on its first move, knight-style, over anything in the way. Players used it to tuck the king into a corner: first slide the rook across, then hop the king over it, two turns in all. Free castling, which let the king and rook finish on a choice of squares, held on in parts of Italy and Germany until Howard Staunton campaigned against it in the 1840s and it slowly died out.
Stalemate has not always been a draw. English writers of the seventeenth century treated it as a defeat for the player who delivered it. In 1614 Arthur Saul wrote that "a stale is a lost game by him that giveth it," and that players who gave one "purchase unto themselves such shame." A 1640 edition explained the logic: the man had unadvisably stopped the course of the game. The rule survived in England and America into the early 1800s.
The repetition rule took its modern shape at the London tournament of 1883, whose book stated that if the same position occurs three times with the same player to move, the game is drawn. Wilhelm Steinitz thought deliberate repetition a legitimate way to gain on the clock. For his 1886 world championship match against Johannes Zukertort the two players wrote their own rule instead: a draw could be claimed only after the same series of moves had been repeated six times in succession.
In 1895 the chess column of the Glasgow Weekly Citizen printed an endgame position and called it a draw. Fernando Saavedra, a Spanish priest and member of the Glasgow Chess Club, looked harder. Promote the pawn to a queen and Black gives up his rook with check; the queen has to take it, and Black then has no legal move at all, which is a stalemate. Promote to a rook instead and Black is lost. The position carries Saavedra's name.
Can a knight visit all 64 squares, landing on none of them twice? Leonhard Euler took the question seriously in 1759, after a suggestion from L. Bertrand of Geneva, and was the first to give it a serious mathematical analysis, introducing ideas that became important in graph theory. He was not the first to try, though: De Moivre and Montmort had solved the puzzle early in the 1700s. A parlor amusement built on the one piece that moves along no rank, file or diagonal had handed mathematics a real problem.
7Bobby Fischer patented a clock that adds time each move
On the tile: Fischer Clock1988
Bobby Fischer is remembered for what he did at the board, but one of his inventions now sits beside it. On August 5, 1988, he filed a United States patent application for a digital chess clock that increments each player's remaining time once per move, instead of handing out a fixed period for a fixed number of moves. The patent was granted on November 28, 1989, to Robert J. Fischer. Players call those added seconds an increment.
Almost every tournament on earth uses one pattern of pieces, and it started as advertising. Nathaniel Cooke registered the design in London on March 1, 1849, under the title Ornamental Design for a set of Chess-Men, and Jaques of London manufactured it. Howard Staunton, one of the strongest players of the day, did not design the set but praised it in his newspaper column, and his name stuck to it. Copies appeared so fast that Jaques ran advertisements warning about spurious imitations.
Checkmate is usually explained as the king is dead, since the word reaches English through the Arabic shah mat. Etymologists are less certain. One standard etymology treats the Arabic as a misreading of Persian mat, which is nearer to astonished or stumped, giving a king left helpless rather than a king killed. The game supports the milder reading: the losing king is never captured or taken off the board. It is only trapped, with no legal move left.
Adolf Anderssen beat Jean Dufresne in 1852, and the game ran in the Deutsche Schachzeitung that September. Its name arrived 27 years later. Annotating one move in The Field on March 29, 1879, shortly after Anderssen's death, Wilhelm Steinitz wrote that it was "an evergreen in the laurel crown of the departed Chess hero." The phrase attached itself to the whole game, and players have called it the Evergreen ever since.
From a box at the Italian Opera in Paris, Paul Morphy beat the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard, who consulted together over the black pieces; Frank Marshall later called it the most famous game of all time. Every retelling names the opera, and the retellings disagree: some say Norma, some The Barber of Seville. Edward Winter, who has gathered the evidence, wrote: "We have never said which opera was being performed, because we cannot say."
At Breslau in 1912 Frank Marshall played a queen move against Stepan Levitsky that could be captured three different ways and answered none of them. The story goes that spectators showered the board with gold coins. Marshall said that is what happened, literally. His widow, Caroline Marshall, later disclaimed knowledge of even a shower of pennies, and another account says Russian spectators were simply paying off lost bets. Edward Winter calls the mystery impossible to unravel.
On October 17, 1956, in the eighth round of the third Rosenwald tournament in New York, Donald Byrne attacked the queen of a thirteen-year-old named Bobby Fischer. Fischer ignored the attack. He played a quiet bishop move instead, let the queen go, and built threats against the white king that could not be met. Hans Kmoch annotated the game in Chess Review that December and called it the Game of the Century. The name stuck.
Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov began a world championship match in September 1984 with no fixed number of games: the winner simply needed six wins. Neither got there. Forty-eight games later, with Kasparov having just taken games 47 and 48 and Karpov still ahead five wins to three, FIDE president Florencio Campomanes flew in and terminated the match on February 15, 1985. The rematch restarted from nothing, capped at 24 games, and Kasparov won the last of them that November.
In January 1999, in the Dutch coastal town of Wijk aan Zee, Garry Kasparov played 24.Rxd4 against Veselin Topalov and handed over a rook. Topalov took it, though engines later preferred a quiet king move instead. Then came 25.Re7, a second rook, and this one could not be taken at all: the capture runs into mate in four. From there the black king was driven out of its shelter and across the board to d1. Topalov met every move after that with the most testing reply, and lost anyway.
The Russia versus the Rest of the World match was played at a rapid time control in a banquet hall in the Kremlin in September 2002. On the second evening Judit Polgár beat Garry Kasparov for the first time in her career, and did it in Moscow of all places. "This victory is one of the absolute highlights of my career," she said afterward. The Rest of the World went on to win the match 52 to 48.
The 2016 world championship in New York came down to rapid tiebreak games, and Magnus Carlsen led Sergey Karjakin 2 to 1 going into the last one, which meant Karjakin had to win with black. Instead Carlsen finished him with 50.Qh6+, a queen offered two ways: take it with the king and a rook mates, take it with the pawn and the other rook mates. The date was November 30, 2016, Carlsen's 26th birthday.
AlphaZero was given the rules of chess and, by its authors' account, no domain knowledge beyond those rules. Instead of studying human games it played against itself. Starting from random play, they reported, it reached a superhuman level within twenty-four hours and convincingly defeated a world-champion program. The same algorithm did the same for shogi and for Go, which is why the paper presents it as a general method rather than a chess engine.
The Lewis chess pieces were found on the Isle of Lewis and were on show in Edinburgh by 1831, although the accounts of the discovery contradict one another. The hoard held 93 gaming pieces, enough for at least four chess sets plus pieces from other games. Most were carved from walrus ivory, a few from sperm whale teeth, and they were probably made in Norway in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century.
Sixteen heavy ivory pieces in Paris are still called the Charlemagne chessmen. A legend recorded in the fourteenth century says the caliph Harun al-Rashid sent them to the emperor for his coronation in the year 800. The Bibliothèque nationale de France answers plainly that Charlemagne never knew the game, which reached the West two centuries later. Armor on the knights matches the Bayeux Tapestry and dates the set to around 1080.
William Caxton's second publication, printed while he was still on the continent in 1475, was a chess book. It is not a manual. The Italian friar Jacobus de Cessolis had written the original as a set of sermons that used the game as an allegory for society, with each piece and each trade of pawn standing for a rank and its duties. Caxton translated it himself and printed a second edition with woodcuts at Westminster around 1483.
4The oldest surviving chess book opens with a poem
On the tile: Lucena1497
The oldest surviving book about chess as it is played today was printed at Salamanca in 1497 by Leonardo Hutz and Lope Sanz. It holds 150 positions and comes from just after the modern queen and bishop appeared in Valencia in the 1470s. The odd part is the front of it. The chess treatise is bound behind a completely unrelated antifeminist poem, and scholars have never explained why, nor identified the author with certainty.
Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled a chess-playing automaton before the empress Maria Theresa in 1770: a turbaned figure at a cabinet crammed with gears, cranks and levers. Audiences believed a machine was thinking. A human player was hidden inside, sliding out of view on a moving seat while the doors were opened, then following the game by candlelight on dangling metal discs that the magnets in the pieces pulled. Edgar Allan Poe tried to expose it in print in 1836. Fire destroyed the Turk in 1854.
6The first international tournament was a knockout
On the tile: London 18511851
London staged the Great Exhibition in 1851, and Howard Staunton used the visiting crowds as his excuse to gather sixteen of Europe's best players for the first international chess tournament. He raised 500 pounds for the prize fund, with money coming from the Café de la Régence in Paris and 100 pounds from the Calcutta Chess Club. The format was a straight knockout. Staunton went out in the third round to Adolf Anderssen, who won the event.
Paris hosted the Summer Olympics in 1924, and chess organizers arranged an international team tournament alongside them at the Hotel Majestic. On July 20, fifteen delegates met at the town hall of the ninth arrondissement of Paris, at 6 Rue Drouot, and signed the act founding what was first called the Fédération Internationale des Échecs, shortened then to FIE. The acronym soon changed to FIDE, and the federation still names that address as its birthplace.
8The title fell vacant, so five players played for it
On the tile: 1948 Title1948
Alexander Alekhine died in 1946 while he still held the world championship, which left nobody for him to lose it to. FIDE settled the question with a tournament rather than a match. Five players, Mikhail Botvinnik, Paul Keres, Max Euwe, Samuel Reshevsky and Vasily Smyslov, met in The Hague and then Moscow between March 2 and May 16, 1948, each facing the others five times. Botvinnik won with 14 points out of 20, three clear of Smyslov.
9The first chess program ran on paper and patience
On the tile: Turochamp1948
Alan Turing and David Champernowne wrote a chess-playing program in 1948, years before a machine existed that could run it. So Turing ran it himself, working through the algorithm with paper and pencil at more than half an hour a move. In 1952 he played a full game that way against his colleague Alick Glennie, and lost after the program blundered its queen. A reconstruction of it met Garry Kasparov in Manchester in 2012, and he won in 16 moves.