Chess began in northern India, as a game called chaturanga, around the 400s CE and certainly before the 600s; the name means "four-limbed", and the old army it points to had foot soldiers, elephants, horses and chariots. Early chess was played on an uncheckered 8x8 board called an ashtapada, and the aim was to capture the other king. From India the game spread to Persia, where it was called chatrang, and Persian nobles were expected to be skilled at it. After the Arab conquest of Persia, chess passed quickly into the Islamic world, where the pieces changed from carved figures to simple abstract shapes. Early Islamic chess masters such as al-Adli, ar-Razi and al-Suli wrote influential chess books. From early manuscripts we know both how the pieces moved and the basic rules of play. Chess likely came into Europe through places where the Islamic and Christian worlds met, such as Italy and Spain.

In Europe, chess pieces went from abstract shapes back to figures; the Lewis chessmen, old chess pieces found in Scotland, were probably made in Trondheim in the late 1100s; a 13th-century Spanish book of games said chess was a nobler and more honoured game than dice or backgammon. In the late 1400s, new rules made the queen by far the most powerful piece on the board; the new rules made chess much faster than the 1,000-year-old game before it, and the new game soon replaced it; a Spanish priest named Ruy Lopez was one of the first chess masters, and he published his analysis of an opening in 1561. In 1749 the French master Francois-Andre Philidor published a chess book, Analyse du jeu des Echecs, that held the line "The pawns are the soul of chess". In the 1700s a chess "machine" called the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, and it actually hid a skilled human player inside.

In 1820 the Mechanical Turk beat 28-year-old Charles Babbage; before the 1850s chess sets were not the same everywhere. In 1849 Jaques of London sold a new style of pieces, the Staunton pattern, which became popular very quickly; before chess clocks, one game could last up to 14 hours, and clocks came into competitive play in the 1800s; the American Paul Morphy toured Europe in the 1850s and beat almost every top player he met, and in 1858 he played the famous "Opera House" game against two opponents who were allies. William Steinitz was recognized as the first world chess champion, and he held the title until 1894. Steinitz had no equal at positional play, which means building up small advantages. Emanuel Lasker was world champion for 27 years, the longest reign of any chess champion. In 1921 the Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca beat Lasker to become the third world champion, and his endgame skill was considered the greatest the world had ever seen.

Some players of the 1920s tried to control the center with pieces instead of only filling it with pawns, an idea called hypermodernism. Alexander Alekhine held the title from 1927 to 1935, then lost it to Max Euwe, and he is the only champion to die while holding the title; the 1948 world championship was the first one overseen by FIDE. Mikhail Botvinnik trained three future world champions, Karpov, Kasparov and Kramnik; a 1925 short film, Chess Fever, helped spread chess in the Soviet Union. In 1972 the American Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky, 12.5 to 8.5, in a world championship match that many people followed. Karpov was known for a solid positional style that has been compared to a boa constrictor. Garry Kasparov was world champion for 15 years, the second longest unbroken reign after Lasker's 27.

Karpov and Kasparov played 144 games against each other in their matches: 104 draws, 21 wins for Kasparov and 19 for Karpov. Kasparov was also the first player to cross the 2800 mark on the official FIDE rating list. In 1996 Kasparov played the computer Deep Blue in Philadelphia. Deep Blue won the first game, but Kasparov won the match, 4 to 2. In May 1997 the two met again in New York, and Deep Blue won, 3.5 to 2.5. Deep Blue could evaluate 200 million chess positions a second, using 32 processors. By about 2005 chess engines had become consistently unbeatable by the best human players. In 2017 a program called AlphaZero was given only the rules of chess and learned by playing against itself, and it played 100 games against the engine Stockfish 8 and won or drew all of them. As of November 2026 Stockfish is a free, open-source chess engine developed by a community of programmers, and it is the highest-rated engine on the computer chess rating list.

Ratings put numbers on strength; the Elo rating system was made by Arpad Elo, a physics professor and chess master; the U.S. Chess Federation adopted it in 1960 and FIDE in 1970; a player rated 100 points higher than an opponent is expected to win about 64 percent of their games. As of November 2026 the highest official FIDE classical rating ever is 2882, reached by Magnus Carlsen in 2014, and no human player has officially reached 2900. Carlsen beat Viswanathan Anand in 2013 to become world champion, won four more matches, and in 2023 chose not to defend the classical title. Ding Liren of China became champion in 2023 by beating Ian Nepomniachtchi of Russia. On December 12, 2024, 18-year-old Gukesh Dommaraju of India beat Ding Liren in Singapore to become the youngest world chess champion, breaking a record held by Kasparov, who became champion in 1985 at age 22.

The grandmaster title is awarded by FIDE, the International Chess Federation, to a player with a 2500 FIDE classical rating who also earns norms; a norm needs a performance rating of 2600 or more in a nine-round FIDE tournament; the first grandmaster titles were awarded to 27 players in 1950, and as of May 2020 there were 1,770 active grandmasters. FIDE was founded in 1924 in Paris, and as of November 2026 it includes 204 countries as members, through national chess federations; the longest master game on record was 269 moves, a draw between Ivan Nikolic and Goran Arsovic in Belgrade on 17 February 1989, and it took 20 hours 15 minutes; the 50-move rule now exists, so that record is unlikely to be beaten.

The Shannon number, about 10^120, is a rough estimate of how many move sequences are possible in chess; it comes from Claude Shannon's 1950 work and assumes about 30 legal moves in a typical position, and it is an order-of-magnitude estimate, not an exact count. As of November 2026 standard chess has not been solved, and no practical computer can search the whole tree of possible games. Zugzwang is a German word that means "a compulsion to move", a position in which any move a player makes leaves them worse off. In some positions it would help a player to skip a turn, but the rules do not allow that. Zugzwang is much more common in the endgame, but it can happen earlier too. Chess960 is a variant that Bobby Fischer advocated, in which the pieces start in one of 960 possible setups and the rules are mostly the same.

Words to know

• chaturanga: early chess
• hypermodernism: center idea
• zugzwang: forced bad move
• engine: chess program
• grandmaster: top title
• variant: changed version