Portal:Chess

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Welcome to the Chess Portal

Introduction

Chess is a board game between two players. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to distinguish it from related games, such as xiangqi (Chinese chess) and shogi (Japanese chess). The current form of the game emerged in Spain and the rest of Southern Europe during the second half of the 15th century after evolving from chaturanga, a similar but much older game of Indian origin. Today, chess is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide.

Chess is an abstract strategy game and involves no hidden information. It is played on a chessboard with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. At the start, each player controls sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns. The player controlling the white pieces moves first, followed by the player controlling the black pieces. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent's king, whereby the king is under immediate attack (in "check") and there is no way for it to escape. There are also several ways a game can end in a draw.

Organized chess arose in the 19th century. Chess competition today is governed internationally by FIDE (the International Chess Federation). The first universally recognized World Chess Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, claimed his title in 1886; Magnus Carlsen is the current World Champion. A huge body of chess theory has developed since the game's inception. Aspects of art are found in chess composition, and chess in its turn influenced Western culture and art, and has connections with other fields such as mathematics, computer science, and psychology. (Full article...)

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Emanuel Lasker (German pronunciation: [eˈmaːnuɛl ˈlaskɐ] (listen); December 24, 1868 – January 11, 1941) was a German chess player, mathematician, and philosopher who was World Chess Champion for 27 years, from 1894 to 1921, the longest reign of any officially recognised World Chess Champion in history. In his prime, Lasker was one of the most dominant champions, and he is still generally regarded as one of the strongest players in history.

His contemporaries used to say that Lasker used a "psychological" approach to the game, and even that he sometimes deliberately played inferior moves to confuse opponents. Recent analysis, however, indicates that he was ahead of his time and used a more flexible approach than his contemporaries, which mystified many of them. Lasker knew contemporary analyses of openings well but disagreed with many of them. He published chess magazines and five chess books, but later players and commentators found it difficult to draw lessons from his methods. (Full article...)

List of selected articles
Adolf Anderssen Alexander Alekhine Anatoly Karpov Anna Muzychuk Ashot Nadanian Bobby Fischer Budapest Gambit Bughouse chess Chess boxing Chess piece point value Chess problem Comparing top chess players throughout history Computer chess Corresponding squares En passant Endgame tablebase Fianchetto First-move advantage in chess Fortress (chess) Garry Kasparov George H. D. Gossip Göttingen manuscript Grandmaster (chess) Hou Yifan Howard Staunton Immortal game José Raúl Capablanca Judit Polgár King (chess) Maia Chiburdanidze Mechanical Turk Mikhail Botvinnik My 60 Memorable Games Origins of chess Proof game Rook and pawn versus rook endgame Rules of chess Ruy Lopez Shatranj Sicilian Defence Stalemate Stuart Milner-Barry The Queen's Gambit (miniseries) Triangulation (chess) Vera Menchik Veselin Topalov Viktor Korchnoi Xiangqi Wilhelm Steinitz World Chess Championship Zwischenzug Mikhail Tal Boris Spassky Queen's graph Rook's graph

General images

The following are images from various chess-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1In 1975, former President of Pakistan Zulfi Bhutto gifted a carved ivory set of chess to the former United States President Gerald Ford. (from Chess in the arts)
Image 2The Chess Players by Henry Fox Talbot, 1847 (from History of chess)
Image 3RZA at a Hip Hop Chess Federation Tournament (from Chess in the arts)
Image 4World Champions José Raúl Capablanca (left) and Emanuel Lasker in 1925 (from History of chess)
Image 5Bobby Fischer vs. Mikhail Tal (from History of chess)
Image 6A Chess Dispute (1903) (from Chess in the arts)
Image 7Antonis Mor, 1549, Von Sachsen vs. a Spaniard (from Chess in the arts)
Image 8Paris Bordone, c. 1545, Chess players, oil on canvas, Mailand, Wohnhaus (from Chess in the arts)
Image 9Some of the earliest examples of chess-related art are medieval illustrations accompanying books or manuscripts, such as this chess problem from the 1283 Libro de los juegos. (from Chess in the arts)
Image 10Thomas Eakins, 1876, The Chess Players (from Chess in the arts)
John Lavery, 1929, The Chess Players (from Chess in the arts)
Image 12Lucas van Leyden, c. 1508, The Game of Chess, oil on oak, 27 x 35 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (from Chess in the arts)
Image 13Richard Creifelds, c. 1886, The Veterans, Brooklyn Museum (from Chess in the arts)
Image 14Iranian shatranj set, glazed fritware, 12th century, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (from History of chess)
Image 15Karel van Mander, 1600 (attributed to), Les joueurs d'échecs (from Chess in the arts)
Image 16Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official World Chess Champion (from History of chess)
Image 17The 12th-century Lewis chessmen in the collection of the National Museum of Scotland. (from History of chess)
Image 18Book of the customs of men and the duties of nobles or the Book of Chess (1473) (from Chess in the arts)
Image 19Liberale da Verona, The Chess Players, c. 1475 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) (from Chess in the arts)
Image 20Krishna and Radha playing chaturanga on an 8×8 Ashtāpada (from History of chess)
Image 21Edward Harrison May, 1867, Lady Howe mating Benjamin Franklin (from Chess in the arts)
Image 22Hans Muelich, 1552, Duke Albrecht V. of Bavaria and his wife Anna of Austria playing chess (from Chess in the arts)
Image 23Niccolò di Pietro, 1413–15, The Conversion of Saint Augustin, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon (from Chess in the arts)
Image 24Chess Set by Man Ray (from Chess in the arts)
Image 25Sofonisba Anguissola, The Chess Game, 1555, National Museum, Poznań, Poland (from Chess in the arts)
Image 26Moors from Andalusia playing chess, Book of Games by King Alfonso X, 1283 (from History of chess)
Image 27Gustaf Lundberg, 1775, Portrait of Gustav Badin, pastel, 74 x 57 cm, Nationalmuseum, Sweden (from Chess in the arts)
Image 28Moors from Andalusia playing chess, Book of Games by King Alfonso X, 1283 (from Chess in the arts)
Image 29Chess game between Tha'ālibī and Bakhazari, 1896 painting by Ludwig Deutsch (from History of chess)
Image 30Shams-e-Tabrīzī as portrayed in a 1500 painting in a page of a copy of Rumi's poem dedicated to Shams (from History of chess)
Image 31Animation of the Immortal Game, in which Adolf Anderssen, playing white, beat Lionel Kieseritzky in June 1851 (from History of chess)
Image 32Stamp of the USSR devoted to the accomplished Estonian player and analyst Paul Keres, 1991 (from History of chess)
Image 33Georgian writers, Ilia Chavchavadze and Ivane Machabeli playing chess in Saint Petersburg, 1873 (from Chess in the arts)
Image 34Persian manuscript from the 14th century describing how an ambassador from India brought chess to the Persian court (from History of chess)
Image 35Honoré Daumier, 1863, The Chess Players (from Chess in the arts)
Image 36Current World Champion Magnus Carlsen (from History of chess)
Image 37Bauhaus chess set by Josef Hartwig (from Chess in the arts)

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FIDE world ranking

Rank	Rank change*	Player	Rating	Rating change*
1		Magnus Carlsen	2859
2		Ding Liren	2811
3		Ian Nepomniachtchi	2793
4		Alireza Firouzja	2785
5		Hikaru Nakamura	2768
6		Fabiano Caruana	2766
7		Anish Giri	2764
8		Wesley So	2760
9		Viswanathan Anand	2754
10		Sergey Karjakin	2747
11		Teimour Radjabov	2747
12		Alexander Grischuk	2745
13		Leinier Dominguez	2743
14		Shakhriyar Mamedyarov	2740
15		Richard Rapport	2740
16		Maxime Vachier-Lagrave	2737
17		Levon Aronian	2735
18		Vidit Santosh Gujrathi	2730
19		Jan-Krzysztof Duda	2729
		Dmitry Andreikin	2729
	1	Yu Yangyi	2729	1
*Change from the previous month

Did you know...

... that Magnus Carlsen, the current World Chess Champion, resigned a recent tournament game after only one move?
... that in 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel, chess pieces can move between different versions of the board in time, hence creating "parallel timelines"?

Reviewed articles

Featured articles	Good articles
First-move advantage in chess	42nd Chess Olympiad	Goryachkina, Aleksandra
Gossip, George H. D.	43rd Chess Olympiad	Guramishvili, Sopiko
List of female chess grandmasters	Abdumalik, Zhansaya	Kazarian, Anna-Maja
Mechanical Turk	Alekhine, Alexander	Kristjánsson, Stefán
	Anderssen, Adolf	Lasker, Emanuel
	Belenkaya, Dina	Mammadzada, Gunay
	Bindrich, Falko	Milner-Barry, Stuart
	Blübaum, Matthias	Modern Benoni
	Budapest Gambit	Muzychuk, Anna
	Bughouse chess	Nadanian, Ashot
	Carlsen, Magnus	Rudolf, Anna
	Chess in Armenia	Rules of chess
	Cramling, Anna	Staunton, Howard
	Deep Blue (Chess computer)	Steinitz, Wilhelm
	En passant	Turochamp
	Endgame tablebase	World Chess Championship 1972
	Fischer, Bobby	Zhou, Qiyu