Chess began in northern India, as a game called chaturanga, around the 400s CE and certainly before the 600s. The name means "four-limbed." The old army the name points to had foot soldiers, elephants, horses and chariots. The goal of chess is to checkmate the other player's king.
From India the game spread to Persia, where it was called chatrang. Persian nobles were expected to be skilled at it. After the Arab conquest of Persia, chess passed quickly into the Islamic world. Then it likely came into Europe through places where the Islamic and Christian worlds met, such as Italy and Spain.
The Lewis chessmen, old chess pieces found in Scotland, were probably made in Trondheim in the late 1100s. In the late 1400s, new rules made the queen by far the most powerful piece on the board.
In the 1700s a chess "machine" called the Mechanical Turk toured Europe. It looked like a thinking machine, but it actually hid a skilled human player inside. Before the 1850s, chess sets were not the same everywhere. In 1849, Jaques of London sold the Staunton pattern, a new style of pieces, and it became popular very quickly.
Before chess clocks, one game could last up to 14 hours. Clocks came into competitive play in the 1800s. In the 1850s the American Paul Morphy toured Europe and beat almost every top player he met. William Steinitz was recognized as the first world chess champion, and he held the title until 1894. Emanuel Lasker was champion for 27 years, the longest reign of any champion.
In 1921 the Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca beat Lasker to become the third world champion. FIDE was founded in 1924 in Paris. In 1972 the American Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky, 12.5 to 8.5, in a world championship match that many people followed.
In May 1997 the computer Deep Blue played world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in New York. Deep Blue won the match, 3.5 to 2.5. In 2013 Magnus Carlsen of Norway beat Viswanathan Anand to become world champion. As of November 2026 the highest official FIDE classical rating ever is 2882, reached by Carlsen in 2014.
The longest master game on record was 269 moves, a draw between Ivan Nikolic and Goran Arsovic in Belgrade on 17 February 1989. It took 20 hours 15 minutes. On December 12, 2024, 18-year-old Gukesh Dommaraju of India beat Ding Liren of China in Singapore to become the youngest world chess champion. The match score was 7.5 to 6.5.
Words to know
- chaturanga: early chess
- Persia: old empire
- champion: top winner
- clocks: timing tools
- Staunton: piece style
