chess facts

Fact #31 - the 2nd book ever in English was about chess?? Really?? what was it? I find that pretty surprising

Here's something about that - http://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/firstbook.html

Looks like your fact 31 might just be right!! surprising! thanks for an intersting list! 

yes I seen ab121705. I also same feel for me and thank you for your comment. I am same doubt you cleared me

*There are a few phrases that every chess player dreads to hear, but loves to say. The first being “Checkmate”, and the second being “Give me a queen”.

*It is a predicament that is wonderful to create, winning a queen most often correlates to a winning game. The queen’s sheer power allows for a player to create many interesting patterns and many unique strategies. It is not very often to see more than 2, let alone, more than 3 queens on the board at any given time.

*That is why the following game is so fascinating. On record, it is one of the only games to have six queens on the board at the same time. Not only that, but they all stuck around for seven moves!

*Szalanczy – Nguyen, Budapest 2009 (Most queens in a chess game)

*The queen at A8 was the sixth queen on the board.

nice! and helpfull

        There is no limit to the number of moves possible in a chess game,  barring stalemate or checkmate, as the three move repetition and fifty move rules do not automatically result in a draw.

Regarding fact number 16,I think a dead fly was found inside the chair..

Take your disgusting attitude back to the multiplayer of Call of Duty where it belongs.

50 moves doesn't automatically result in a draw, but after a recent change in the rules 70 moves does so there is a limit.

* There are 170,000,000,000,000,000,000 ways to play the first 10 opening moves of chess.

What is Call of Duty? Can't stand it when people use actual facts so you denigrate me by calling my attitude disgusting? Nice.

Please, explain how presenting facts to refute you and then explaining how educating yourself will enlighten you is disgusting. Do you usually lose a debate then start personal attacks on someone? Not a very enlightened way of debating. 

Don't you think you started it by saying your petty "Believe what you want, but simple education will enlighten you" insults?
It was condemned by the leader and was restored and forgotten and it was allowed again after his death in 1125, just as I said.
Whatever, I don't have time to deal with this childish nonsense.

I'm gonna stick with my source on this point.

347, not 355.

http://wismuth.com/chess/statistics-games.html 

Incidently, those numbers refer to sequences of move. The number of final positions is much lower. 4, and 105.

No, actually, I was just pointing out that education enlightens. (It is no shame to be ignorant, it is a shame to be ignorant, become informed of the facts, then continue to be ignorant.) You then called my attitude disgusting. A flagrant insult.

The lesder condemned it FOR THE ENTIRE RELIGION. You do understand how religion and religious leaders work, right?

That is just one example. All religions have done this at various times in history. Just because you say it did not happen does not make it so. 

Again, educate yourself, it is elightening.

I'm done now, you can go back to your world.

*The Knight’s move has always been the same in chess, and may even predate the game! Its move may come from a mathematical puzzle, in which the Knight must pass through every square on the chess board, and its move was then given to a piece in chess when the game was invented.

*In shatranj, the predecessor to chess, the Queen was a minister or vizier, and still is in many languages.

*Initially, the Queen could only move one square at a time, diagonally. Later, she could move two squares at a time, diagonally. It wasn’t until Reconquista Spain, with its powerful queen Isabella, that the Queen became the strongest piece on the board.

*In Medieval Europe, a player could not promote a pawn to Queen while a Queen was still on the board, so that the King wouldn’t have two wives at once.

*There are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the universe!

*“Checkmate” comes from the Persian shah mat , which means, “the king is dead.”

*The folding chess board was originally invented in 1125 by a chess-playing priest. Since the Church forbid priests to play chess, he hid his chess board by making one that looked simply like two books lying together.

*Chess began in India during the Gupta Empire, spreading to the Persian Sassanid Empire, and then to the Middle East after Muslims conquered Persia. From there, it spread to Europe and Russia.

*In English, the word Rook comes from rukh , Persian for chariot. In Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, it’s a tower, and in Russian, it’s a ship!

*The Bishop is only a bishop in Icelandic and English. In shatranj, the predecessor to chess, it was an elephant. In Polish and Finnish, it’s a messenger; in Czech, it’s a rifleman; in most Germanic languages, it’s a runner; and in French, it’s a fool!

*In many languages, the Pawn is a footsoldier, but in German and Spanish, it’s a peasant or farmer, instead!

*In shatranj, the predecessor of chess, the pieces represent the parts of an army. The Pawns are footsoldiers, the Rooks are chariots, the Knights are cavalry, the Bishops are elephants, and the King and Queen are the emperor and his minister.

The reason why traditional chess pieces don’t look like actual soldiers, bishops, and kings is because before the game reached Europe, it passed through the Islamic world. Islam forbids making statues of animals or people, so chess pieces became vague-looking. When the game spread to Christian Europe, the pieces didn’t change much.

*The oldest surviving complete chess sets were found on the Isle of Lewis, in northern Scotland, and dates to the 12 century. They were probably made in Iceland or Norway, and their appearance was used in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the wizard chess pieces.

*In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen made a machine that could play chess, astonishing Europe! However, it was actually a fake. The Mechanical Turk, as it was called, contained a chess player hidden inside the table, who controlled the Turk.

*In the early 11 century, the Holy Roman Emperor’s daughter was “won” in a chess game between her brother and her future husband, Ezzo, the Count Palatine, a German noble.

*Chess was originally designed to teach war, and even the Soviet Union required its generals to learn chess.

*Throughout the Middle Ages, chess was banned by priests and kings numerous times, but always survived with its popularity intact.

*The oldest recorded chess game in history is from the 900s, between a historian from Baghdad and his student.

*Because of the way the King, Queen, Bishops, Knights, Rooks, and Pawns work together, each with their own role, the game was used to help explain morality and comment on society during the Middle Ages.

*The first computer program for playing chess was developed in 1951, by Alan Turing. However, no computer was powerful enough to process it, so Turing tested it by doing the calculations himself and playing according to the results, taking several minutes per move.

*Chess was one of the few ways a man could visit a woman in her chamber during Medieval and Early Modern times.

*The second book ever printed in the English language was about chess!

*A Medieval European tradition said that chess was invented by a philosopher to pacify a tyrannical king. The game was designed to teach him how a king led his subjects and protected them from danger, while the subjects protected the king.

*Chess is a board game for two players. It is played on a square board, made of 64 smaller squares, with eight squares on each side. Each player starts with sixteen pieces: eight pawns, two knights, two bishops, two rooks, one queen and one king.

interesting!

It may be true that Rsava overstated his claim when he said "most all religions", since there is a considerable bevy of religions in the world, but there are indeed more cases besides the one he mentioned, e.g. Islam.

Although chess quickly made indelibly marks in the arab culture after the muslims conquered Persia, it was at the beginning considered blasphemous and thus generally rejected and prohibited, and there have been bans as recent as in the second half of the past century in Iraq and Afghanistan.

GnrfFrtzl, Rsava's tone at the end might not have been corteous, but I must say that I really understand him, since reading someone alleging out of ignorance can be really really annoying.

@GnrfFrtzl
Actually, I correct myself: Rsava was courteous, you were not.

I'm not buying "fact" #1.