Chess

• 1. Introduction

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  Chess is a board game for two players that has traveled further and lasted longer than almost any other human invention. It began in 7th-century India as chaturanga, a game whose four divisions - infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariotry - mirrored the actual structure of an ancient army. From there it moved west into Persia, then into the Arab world, then into medieval Europe. The word "checkmate" itself descends directly from the Persian phrase shah mat, meaning "the king is dead". By the end of the 15th century, European players had transformed it into the game recognized today. By the end of the 19th century, those rules had become universal.

  Who were the great champions who shaped its competitive history? How did a board game become the proving ground for Cold War rivalries? And what happened in 1997 when a machine sat down across from the reigning World Champion and won? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. From Chaturanga to Chess

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  Chaturanga was played on an 8x8 uncheckered board called the ashtapada, and its pieces bore names tied to military rank: the footsoldier would eventually become the pawn, the horse the knight, the elephant the bishop, and the chariot the rook. The game spread eastward and westward along the Silk Road. The oldest archaeological chess artifacts ever found - ivory pieces excavated at ancient Afrasiab, today's Samarkand in Uzbekistan - date to about 760. Almost all the oldest pieces discovered trace routes along the Silk Road, from the Tarim Basin through Central Asia into Iran.

  The Muslim world absorbed the game after the Islamic conquest of Persia between 633 and 651, renaming it shatranj. In Spanish it became ajedrez, derived from al-shatranj, and in Portuguese xadrez. The rest of Europe borrowed the Persian word for king - shāh - producing "check" and eventually "chess". The oldest known chess manual dates to about 840 and was written in Arabic by al-Adli ar-Rumi, a renowned player whose work is titled Kitab ash-shatranj, or The Book of Chess. That manuscript is now lost, but later writers referenced it extensively.

  By the year 1000, chess had spread through both Muslim Iberia and Latin Europe. A Latin poem called Versus de scachis, dated to the late 10th century, was preserved at Einsiedeln Abbey in Switzerland. Around 1200, European players began modifying the rules of shatranj, and these changes accelerated dramatically near 1475, when new piece movement rules appeared in intellectual circles in Valencia, Spain. Bishops and queens acquired their modern sweeping powers. Pawns gained the ability to advance two squares on their first move. The queen, which had replaced the earlier vizier piece toward the end of the 10th century, became so dominant that modern chess was for a time called "Mad Queen Chess".

• 3. World Champions and the Championship

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  Prague-born Wilhelm Steinitz defeated the leading German master Johannes Zukertort in 1886, a match considered the first official World Chess Championship. Steinitz brought something new to the game beyond just winning: he introduced a scientific approach that broke a position down into its components and prepared correct long-term plans. His analytical method marked a stylistic break from the attacking, combinative play of the earlier Romantic era.

  Steinitz lost his crown in 1894 to Emanuel Lasker, a German mathematician who then held the title for 27 years, the longest tenure of any world champion. After Lasker came José Raúl Capablanca from Cuba, celebrated for his endgame skill, who was undefeated in tournament play for eight consecutive years from 1916 to 1924. Capablanca won the championship from Lasker in 1921, but lost it in 1927 to the Russian-French player Alexander Alekhine, who died as the reigning world champion in 1946.

  FIDE assumed control of the title in 1948, organizing a tournament of elite players whose winner was Russian Mikhail Botvinnik. Botvinnik's era launched a period of Soviet dominance at the top of world chess, driven in part by the Soviet government's deliberate effort to demonstrate intellectual superiority over the West. That dominance held almost uninterrupted for more than half a century. The one interruption came from Bobby Fischer of the United States, champion from 1972 to 1975, whose 1972 match against Boris Spassky was followed closely by news media around the world and carried significant Cold War symbolism.

  Botvinnik himself had won and regained the world title multiple times: he lost to Vasily Smyslov in 1957 and regained it in a rematch in 1958, then lost to the 23-year-old Latvian prodigy Mikhail Tal in 1960 and again regained it in a rematch in 1961. Tal, widely regarded as one of the most creative players in the history of chess, was nicknamed "the magician from Riga". The champion following Tal's brief reign was Armenian Tigran Petrosian, renowned for his defensive skills, who held the title from 1963 to 1969. Garry Kasparov from Baku, Soviet Azerbaijan, became the dominant figure of world chess from the mid-1980s until his retirement from competition in 2005. Gukesh Dommaraju of India holds the title today, having won it in 2024.

• 4. Theory, Tactics, and Strategy

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  H.J.R. Murray estimated in 1913 that the total number of books, magazines, and chess columns in newspapers had reached about 5,000. By 1949, B.H. Wood estimated the number at roughly 20,000. The John G. White Chess and Checkers Collection at Cleveland Public Library holds over 32,000 chess books and more than 6,000 bound volumes of chess periodicals, one of the largest chess libraries in public hands.

  Chess theory divides a game into three phases: the opening, the middlegame, and the endgame. In the opening, players develop their pieces and compete for control of the central squares. Sequences of opening moves have been catalogued in reference works such as the Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings; in some lines, the best sequence for both sides has been worked out to more than 30 moves. The middlegame is where most combinations occur - a combination being a forced sequence of tactical moves, often involving a sacrifice, that achieves a concrete gain. Brilliant combinations, such as those in the Immortal Game, are admired by players as works of beauty.

  The endgame brings its own distinct logic. Pawns grow in importance as their promotion becomes a decisive factor. The king, which required protection during the middlegame, emerges as an active piece. Zugzwang - a situation in which being forced to move is a disadvantage - becomes a factor that rarely appears in earlier stages. Position evaluation during all three phases involves counting material value: pawns are worth roughly one point, knights and bishops about three each, rooks about five, and queens about nine.

  The Romantic school of the 18th and early 19th centuries prized tactical beauty above strategic correctness. In that era, declining a gambit was considered unsportsmanlike, and virtually all games began with open attacking play. The theoretical school that Steinitz introduced replaced that aesthetic with positional rigor. In the interwar period, the hypermodernists - including Aron Nimzowitsch and Richard Réti - pushed further, advocating control of the center with distant pieces rather than pawns, inviting opponents to occupy the center only to attack those pawns later.

• 5. Computers and the Game's Future

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  Chess-playing computer programs began to appear in the 1960s, and by 1970 the first major computer chess tournament, the North American Computer Chess Championship, had been held. The first commercial chess database was introduced by the German company ChessBase in 1987, and databases containing millions of games have since transformed how players at every level prepare and study.

  In 1997, Deep Blue became the first computer to win a match against a reigning World Chess Champion, defeating Garry Kasparov in a six-game contest. That result opened an era of computer dominance. By the 2010s, engines significantly stronger than the best human players were freely available on personal computers and mobile devices. In 2017, AlphaZero - a neural network also capable of playing shogi and Go - introduced novel ideas about how the game could be played, influencing style at the highest levels.

  Endgame tablebases charted a parallel course. Lewis Stiller published a tablebase covering select six-piece endgames in 1991. By 2005, following the publication of Nalimov tablebases, all six-piece endgame positions had been solved. The Lomonosov tablebases, published in 2012, extended that solution to all seven-piece positions. Despite this computational depth, chess as a whole remains unsolved.

  The Internet Chess Server, developed at the University of Utah in 1992, gave players worldwide real-time access to opponents they would never otherwise meet. The Internet Chess Club, the first commercial chess server, launched in 1995. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, isolation combined with the success of the Netflix series The Queen's Gambit and the rise of online tournaments and streaming figures like Hikaru Nakamura and Magnus Carlsen produced a widely noted surge in chess interest, described in the media as the 2020 online chess boom. In 2025, chess was added to Saudi Arabia's Esports World Cup, and the number of esport organizations signing chess players rose considerably.

• 6. Titles, Ratings, and Governance

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  FIDE, formally the Fédération Internationale des Échecs, governs international chess and counts the national chess organizations of more than 180 countries among its members. It is recognized as a sports governing body by the International Olympic Committee, though chess has never been part of the Olympic Games. FIDE assumed control of the World Chess Championship in 1948 and uses the Elo rating system, developed by Arpad Elo, to rank players. An average club player carries a rating of about 1500. The highest FIDE rating ever recorded is 2882, achieved by Magnus Carlsen twice - once in May 2014 and once in August 2019.

  FIDE awards several lifetime titles. The Grandmaster title, the highest, requires a rating of 2500 or above at least once and three qualifying results called norms in tournaments that include grandmasters from outside the applicant's own country. The International Master title carries a minimum rating of 2400; the FIDE Master title requires a rating of 2300; and the Candidate Master title requires at least 2200. Separate women-only titles - Woman Grandmaster, Woman International Master, Woman FIDE Master, and Woman Candidate Master - exist at performance levels roughly 200 rating points below the corresponding open titles. The continued existence of these separate titles has been debated; former world championship challenger Judit Polgár has argued that they are unnecessary and reinforce gender distinctions rather than competitive standards. Beginning with Nona Gaprindashvili in 1978-40 women have earned the open Grandmaster title.

  The Women's World Chess Championship was established in 1927; the first to hold the title was Czech-English master Vera Menchik. The current Women's World Champion is Ju Wenjun of China. Invitation-only tournaments that regularly gather the world's strongest players include Spain's Linares event, the Tata Steel tournament at Wijk aan Zee, Monte Carlo's Melody Amber tournament, the Dortmund Sparkassen meeting, and Sofia's M-tel Masters.