Chess history
Chess history is well known to chess aficionados. Though we take nowadays chess for granted, chess came a long way to be comfortable, suitable, favorable and applicable. Some key moments in its development made chess so comprehensive but clear and unique.
There are still disputes on origin of chess between India, Persia, and Arabia.
At the end of the 10th century chessboard got its dark and light squares, black and white afterward.
At the second half of the 15th century the queen was enabled to move both like the bishop and the rook instead of only one move diagonally. Castling was also introduced those years, as well as bishop’s moves, were standardized.
Those years also gave us first books, poems, and treatises on chess, but in 1575 the first informal chess tournament was held.
In the middle of the 18th century we got François-André Danican Philidor, the first chess master with international fame. Please have in mind that then were no media like radio, TV and internet Just newspapers, letters and mouth-to-mouth transmission. In 1763 chess muse Caissa was officially introduced by Sir William Jones although She was mentioned almost 250 years before.
In 1770 the Mechanical Turk started with his winning streak which amazed many celebrities of the time like Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Although being a fake chess-playing machine The Turk gained much popularity.
1830 gave us first recorded mention of female chess player. Soon in 1849 the Staunton chess set is created by Nathaniel Cooke. Howard Staunton was probably the best chess player in the middle of the 19th century and he promoted nowadays suitable chess pieces design whole-heartedly.
Timing was right to time a game with sand hourglasses in 1850s with the quantity of sand to last three hours for each opponent. Until then chess games lasted 10 and more hours and the winning was sometimes due to more exhausted opponent.
In 1857 the first chess epidemic happened in USA with Paul Morphy being the patient zero. He won the first American chess congress being 20-year-old and soon became unofficial world chess champion after defeating leading players in US in Europe. Except Staunton.
William Steinitz, Austrian-American chess player became the first official World chess champion in 1886 winning Johannes Zukentort. More to say, Steinitz is the father of modern chess with his strategic understanding and developing positional style of chess, He wrote on chess being the chess promoter and theoretician. Some called his style “cowardly” but he had been undefeated for almost 30 years until Emanuel Lasker won the title in 1894.
After decades of mostly Soviet/Russian domination, chess prodigy from USA Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in 1972 in maybe the most famous chess event having in mind the cold war era.
Bobby disappeared from the public and Anatoly Karpov became No. 1 until he was defeated by Gary Kasparov in 1985. Fischer and Kasparov stayed legends and probably most famous chess champions of the time. Chess was extremely popular those days.
Computer chess entered the big scene. In 1997 computer Deep Blue defeated Kasparov by a score 3,5 to 2,5. Prior to that Deep Blue and his predecessor Deep Thought fell to Kasparov.
Magnus Carlsen became his reign era in 2013. He was born in 1990 and received GM title when he was 13 years old. He surpassed 2800 rating when he was 18 years old and peaked number 1 in 2010. Having in mind his chess performance and influence we could call the last decade a Magnus era, and it is still running.
Nowadays players rely on computers a lot. Advanced chess joints human and computer intelligence for better performance but we should have in mind that Carlsen’s peak rating is 2882 and Stockfish 9 chess engine has ELO rating 3438.
I hope the next era will not belong to androids playing super chess. Come with human chess if you want chess to live.
