The history of chess

From chaturanga to shatranj

Chess began in northern India around the sixth century CE as chaturanga — "four divisions", the elephants, chariots, cavalry and infantry of an Indian army. It had a king, a counsellor, elephants, horses, chariots and foot soldiers: the same six-piece skeleton we use now.

Persia adopted it as shatranj, and gave us the vocabulary: shah (king) became "check", shah mat — "the king is helpless" — became "checkmate". The Arab conquest of Persia spread shatranj across the Islamic world, where the first great players and the first written analysis appeared. Al-Adli and as-Suli, ninth and tenth century masters, wrote treatises and composed problems that survive.

Shatranj was a slower game than ours. The counsellor (firzan) moved one square diagonally; the elephant jumped exactly two diagonally. Games could take a hundred moves to reach a decision, and openings were played out from fixed starting arrangements called tabiyat.

Europe and the mad queen

Chess entered Europe through Islamic Spain and Sicily around the year 1000, and spread quickly through the aristocracy. The pieces were renamed for European society: the counsellor became the queen, the elephant became the bishop, the chariot the rook (from Persian rukh), the foot soldier the pawn.

Around 1475 the game changed more in a generation than it had in five centuries. In Spain and Italy the queen was given her modern, devastating range and the bishop its full diagonal. The new game was called scacchi alla rabiosa — "mad queen chess" — and it was faster, sharper and far more tactical. Within decades it had replaced shatranj everywhere in Europe.

The first modern chess book, by the Spanish priest Ruy López de Segura (1561), analysed the opening that still bears his name. Italian masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries turned chess into a professional entertainment, and the Italian and Spanish schools argued about attacking play for two hundred years.

Philidor, Morphy, Steinitz: chess becomes a discipline

François-André Danican Philidor, an eighteenth-century French composer and the strongest player of his age, wrote the sentence that founded positional chess: "the pawns are the soul of chess." Before him, pawns were obstacles; after him, pawn structure was the skeleton of a plan.

Paul Morphy, an American lawyer, toured Europe in 1858 and beat everyone he played. His games are still the standard teaching material for development and open lines — he simply got his pieces out faster than anyone else understood was necessary.

Wilhelm Steinitz won the first official World Championship match in 1886 and, more importantly, explained why he won. His theory — that attacks should follow from accumulated small advantages rather than inspiration — turned chess from an art into a discipline with transmissible principles. Every strategy book since is a footnote to Steinitz.

The twentieth century produced the champions whose names became adjectives: Lasker's practical toughness, Capablanca's effortless endgames, Alekhine's complications, Botvinnik's scientific preparation, Tal's sacrifices, Petrosian's prophylaxis, Fischer's precision, Karpov's squeeze, Kasparov's calculation.

The Cold War, Fischer, and chess as politics

From 1948 the world championship was, with one interruption, Soviet property. The USSR treated chess as a demonstration of intellectual superiority, funded it accordingly, and produced an unbroken line of champions.

The interruption was Bobby Fischer, who beat Boris Spassky in Reykjavík in 1972 in a match followed by people who had never played a game. Fischer's victory produced a chess boom across the Western world, and his refusal to defend the title in 1975 ended it almost as abruptly.

The politics ran the other way too: Karpov versus Kasparov, played across five matches from 1984 to 1990, was as much Soviet establishment against Soviet dissent as it was chess. Their 1984 match was abandoned without result after 48 games and five months.

Deep Blue, Stockfish, AlphaZero

Chess was the standing challenge of early artificial intelligence. Claude Shannon set out the method in 1950 — search the tree, evaluate the leaves — and for forty years progress was mostly hardware.

In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov 3½–2½ in a six-game match. It was the first time a reigning world champion lost a match to a machine under tournament conditions, and it ended the question of whether computers would ever play chess well.

Two later shifts mattered more for players. Engines became free — Stockfish and its peers put grandmaster-plus analysis on every phone, which changed how openings are prepared and how games are studied. And in 2017 DeepMind's AlphaZero learned chess from nothing but the rules and self-play, then played a style — long-term piece activity, pawn sacrifices for space, h-pawn advances — that professionals have been copying ever since.

Chess today

Chess is in the strongest position in its history. Tens of millions play online every day; streaming and short-format chess have brought in an audience that does not play classical games at all; and the barrier to improvement has collapsed, because anyone can analyse their own games with an engine for free.

The competitive structure remains: FIDE, founded in 1924, runs the world championship cycle and the title system — Grandmaster, International Master, FIDE Master — and national federations run the rating pools underneath. Judit Polgár, the strongest female player in history, reached the world top ten in the 1990s playing exclusively in open competition, and the debate she started about separate women's events is still live.

Common questions