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The History of Chess in Fifty Moves recounts the 1,500-year history of the game of royals, from its ancient beginnings to Deep Blue, Kasparov and internet chess.

As stand-alone stories or in sequence, the 50 chapters explain how chess has changed, adapted, and thrived through the centuries. It reveals the sublime players, the controversies, the great tournaments and upsets, the victories... nothing is overlooked.

Entertaining and faithful text descriptions, artwork reproductions, archival photographs, callout boxes, quotations of interest, and chessboard diagrams bring chess's colorful history to life.

The stories cover the globe's chessboards and the game's generations of players, including:

• The Turk, the automaton hoax that fooled royalty
• Theories on the origin of chess
• The longest match
• The Polgar sisters
• The decline of Boris Spassky
• The Bobby Fischer phenomenon
• The Soviet invasion
• Chess, codebreaking and Bletchley Park
• The female Soviet, Vera Menchik
• The first official chess Olympiad
• Phillip Stamma notates chess
• The Da Vinci connection
• Capablanca versus Alekhine
• The Internet changes everything.

For chess players at all levels, The History of Chess in Fifty Moves is an exciting treat they will return to again and again.

In 50 concise chapters, Price colorfully traces the journey of chess from India (where it began as the game chaturanga) to Persia, its dissemination through the West and ultimately the world, and its latest transformation into a digital game played over the Internet. Price convincingly explores the early history of chess and the social contexts that have supported it to the present: royal courts, coffee houses, parks, and Soviet schools, to name a few. Price invites readers into the game and introduces them to the varied strategies of modern masters, including Andr Danican Philidor and the utilization of the pawn, the aggression of the Romantics, the use of positional play by Howard Staunton, and the tactical considerations of Hypermoderns. This is not an overly technical book, and famous moves such as the Sicilian Defense and Nimzo-Indian Defense are only really mentioned in passing. However, with the focus on the characters who loomed large and the environments that they helped 
shape, this is a great book to orient casual readers and direct them to other sources according to their interest. It is attractively designed with plenty of photos and illustrations. ( Publisher's Weekly 2015-09-01)