A game for two players played on a board containing 64 squares alternately black and white. Each player has 16 pieces, either black or white, consisting of eight pawns, two rooks (also known as castles), two knights, two bishops, a queen, and a king. The game is one of strategy, the object being to attack the opponent's king in such fashion that it cannot move safely. That attacking move is called checkmate. All pieces have set moves, and the most versatile is the queen. The game was probably first played in ancient India, where it was known as chaturanga, then spread E to China and W to Persia. The earliest documentary references are in Persian and Chinese texts in c.600. A Chinese bibliography of that date includes books on chess, and a 10th-c Chinese encyclopedia dates it to 568.
The international body which supervises the game is the World Chess Federation (Fédération Internationale des Echecs, or FIDE). It traditionally organizes the world chess championships and other international competitions, though in 1987 a disagreement between Russian grandmaster Gary Kasparov and FIDE over levels of prize funding and FIDE's alleged autocratic methods led Kasparov to promote a breakaway body (the Professional Chess Association, or PCA). This body mounted an independent championship match in 1993 between Kasparov and his official challenger, UK grandmaster Nigel Short. Both players were then stripped of their right to contest the World Chess Federation title by FIDE, who invited Russian grandmaster Anatoly Karpov and Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman to play in their place. Kasparov and Karpov won their respective matches, and the division continues to this day, with Karpov holding the official FIDE title, but most experts regarding Kasparov as the world's top player. Karpov beat Gata Kamsky of the USA in 1996, and the year after, Kasparov beat Vishwanathan Anand of India. Following the collapse of the PCA, and the subsequent collapse of the World Chess Council set up to replace it, the 2000 world championship was contested under the aegis of Braingames Network, an Internet company, and won by Vladimir Kramnik. Anand regained the FIDE championship in 2000, but lost it to Ruslan Ponomariov (Ukraine) in 2002. An agreement was signed in Prague (May, 2002) to unify the various competing federations under FIDE with a reunification contest in 2003, but the event had still not taken place by the start of 2006.
| Chess | |
|---|---|
|
From left, a white king, black rook and queen, white pawn, black knight, and white bishop in a set of Staunton chess pieces. |
|
| Players | 2 |
| Setup time | 10–60 seconds |
| Playing time | 1 minute - 7 hours* |
| Rules complexity | Medium |
| Strategy depth | Very High |
| Random chance | None |
| Skills required | Tactics, Strategy |
| * Games by correspondence may last much longer | |
| Chess Portal |
Chess is an abstract strategy board game and mental sport for two players.
Chess is one of the world's most popular board games;
Many variants and relatives of chess are played throughout the world.
Gameplay
Overview of the game
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The position of the pieces at the start of a game of chess. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Chess is played on a square board of 8 rows (called ranks) and 8 columns (called files) of squares.
Each player begins the game with 16 pieces which can move in defined directions, and in some instances, limited range, and can remove (capture) other pieces from the board: each player's pieces comprise 8 pawns, 2 knights, 2 bishops, 2 rooks, 1 queen and 1 king.
Chess has been described not only as a game but also as an art, a science, and a sport.
Rules of chess
When a game begins, one player controls the sixteen white pieces while the other uses the sixteen black pieces.
Each kind of chess piece moves a different way. One's own pieces ("friendly pieces") cannot be passed if they are in the line of movement, and a friendly piece can never replace another friendly piece.
Chess games do not have to end in checkmate — either player may resign if the situation looks hopeless.
Until the 1970s, at least in English-speaking countries, chess games were recorded and published using descriptive chess notation. Several notations have emerged, based upon algebraic chess notation, for recording chess games in a format suitable for computer processing. This is useful for adjourning a game to resume later or for conveying chess problem positions without a diagram.
Sample game
A sample chess game is made to help understand how to play chess and its rules. It explains chess through a simple demonstration, move after move. Please read this sample chess game for details.
Strategy and tactics
Chess openings are a sequence of moves, often memorized, which will help a player build up his position and prepare for the middlegame. The Classical School of chess expounds the virtues of occupying the center early using pawns and/or pieces, while Hypermodernism advocates the control of the center not by using pawns but with distant pieces.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The black knight on e6 is pinned to its king by the white bishop, and the white knight is pinned to the queen on b1 by the black rook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
When taking and trading pieces, the chess piece point values become important. there is no scoring and chess was played long before the idea of assigning points to pieces.
Chess combinations and traps do not appear out of thin air. These types of "weaknesses" include: pinned pieces, overloaded pieces, weaknesses around the opponent's king, weak squares, unprotected pieces, weak color complexes, pieces not able to come back to defend the king, etc.
Chess combinations often include a number of types of tactic "methods" which many middlegame books classify and provide examples of.
A few common positional elements which high level chess players routinely must assess include pawn structure, king safety, space, and control of key squares and groups of squares (e.g.
Great chess writer Aron Nimzowitsch outlined in the classic work My System a number of middlegame positional principles such as "rook on the 7th rank", "undermining the pawn chain", "restrain, blockade and destroy".
Alternative ways to play chess
Blitz chess is a version of chess where a chess clock is used to limit the time control for each player. Speed chess requires the player to spend less time thinking because if the player's time runs out, he loses.
When two players are separated by great distances they can still play chess. Correspondence chess is chess played through the mail, e-mail or special correspondence chess servers.
Chess can also be played blindfold. Some very strong chess players are able to play multiple blindfold games simultaneously.
Chess boxing is a hybrid sport which alternates rounds of boxing with (short) sessions of chess.
Chess variants
Chess variants are forms of chess where the game is played with a different board, special fairy pieces or different rules. Pritchard, the author of Encyclopedia of Chess Variants, estimates that there are more than two thousand chess variants, confining the number to published ones.
Many chess grandmasters played chess variants and some even invented new ones. José Raúl Capablanca feared a "draw death" of chess and suggested making the board larger and adding new pieces, such as a combination of rook and knight and also a combination of bishop and knight. He played a number of test games and finally setlled on an 8x10 chess variant, Capablanca chess.
Bobby Fischer objected to what he considered to be an overemphasis on memorized chess openings in normal chess and invented a chess variant in response. In this chess variant, originally called Fischer Random Chess but now typically called Chess960, the initial position is selected randomly before each game.
There are many more chess variants, like Suicide chess, where the goal of the game is to lose all of one's pieces and if a piece can be taken, it must be taken by the opposing side. Very popular between chess players is also Bughouse chess, in which two teams of players play against each other and give captured pieces to their partner. To speed up the game, one can play Marseillais chess, where two moves are made per turn. Even faster chess variant is Progressive chess, where the number of pieces one can move increases each turn (i.e. In Atomic chess, not only is the captured piece removed from the board after the capture, but also the capturing piece and every other piece of both players, positioned in any adjacent square to that of the capture.
In the context of chess problems, chess variants are called fantasy chess, heterodox chess or fairy chess. Some chess variants are used only in chess composition and not for playing.
History
Origins of chess
Many countries claim to have invented chess in some incipient form. The most commonly held view is that chess originated in India, since the Arabic, Persian, Greek, Portuguese and Spanish words for chess are all derived from the Sanskrit game Chaturanga. The present version of chess played throughout the world ultimately derives from a version of Chaturanga that was played in India around the 6th century.
Another theory exists that chess arose from the similar game of Xiangqi (Chinese chess), or at least a predecessor thereof, existing in China since the 2nd century BC.
Chess eventually spread westward to Europe and eastward as far as Japan, spawning variants as it went. There is a theory that this name replacement happened because, before the game of chess came to Europe, merchants coming to Europe brought ornamental chess kings as curiosities and with them their name shāh, which Europeans mispronounced in various ways.
Chess eventually reached Russia via Mongolia, where it was played at the beginning of the 7th century. The entrance of chess into Europe is marked by changes to the rules, including changes to the moves of the bishops, pawns and queen, with the modern form emerging in the 19th century.
Origins of chess terms
Checkmate: This is the English rendition of shāh māt, which is Persian for "the king is finished".Development of modern chess rules and pieces
Early on, the pieces in European chess had limited movement;
By the end of the 15th century, the modern rules for the basic moves had been adopted from Italy: pawns gained the option of moving two squares on their first move and the en passant capture therewith, bishops acquired their modern move, and the queen was made the most powerful piece; consequently modern chess was referred to as "Queen's Chess" or "Mad Queen Chess".
Organization of chess
Chess is an organized sport with structured international and national leagues, tournaments and congresses.
FIDE is a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), but the game of chess has not ever been part of the Olympic Summer or Winter Games.
Important chess competitions
For most, the ultimate chess competition is the World Chess Championship. Vladimir Kramnik was World Champion by natural succession (having defeated the last undisputed World Champion Garry Kasparov in a match, and not having lost a match since), while Veselin Topalov was the official FIDE World Champion, having won the FIDE World Chess Championship 2005.
In women's chess, the world's highest rated female player Judit Polgar has never participated in the Women's World Chess Championship, instead preferring to compete with the leading men on what is commonly regarded as the elite tournament circuit.
Other competitions for individuals include the World Junior Chess Championship, the European Individual Championship and the National Chess Championships of countries around the world. Popular too, are Monte Carlo's Melody Amber tournament, the Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting and Wijk aan Zee's Corus chess tournament.
Regular team chess events include the Chess Olympiad and European Team Championship.
The World Chess Solving Championship is both a team and an individual event.
Computer chess
Serious work on machines that play chess has been going on since 1890, and chess-playing computer programs featured prominently in the artificial intelligence boom of the 1950s - 1970s. At first considered only a curiosity, the best chess playing programs -- like Shredder, Fritz etc. at regular time controls battles between the very best chess programs and the very best human players have been finely balanced. The method by which naive computer programs play chess does not really resemble the way humans play chess -- the computer calculates the board position after every possible combination of legal moves and acts accordingly, whereas human masters act more from intuition and pattern recognition. Moreover, as CPU speed and memory become less expensive, computer chess programs can search ever larger numbers of moves in the same amount of time, and store ever larger databases of opening and endgame positions. the methods used to play high-level chess are very different to the ones used for machine learning, machine vision, and the like.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) held the first major chess tournament for computers, the 1st United States Computer Chess Championship, in September 1970. CHESS 3.0, a chess program from Northwestern University, won the championship.
Garry Kasparov, then ranked number one in the world, played a six-game match against IBM's chess computer Deep Blue in February 1996.
The chess machine Hydra is the intellectual descendant of Deep Blue;
Kasparov's loss to Deep Blue has inspired the creation of chess variants in which human intelligence can still overpower computer calculation.
User Comments Add a comment…