History of Chess

To the best of our knowledge, the history of chess started out in
Northern India about 1500 years ago, where it was called chaturanga. However, it was a four-handed game.

There're allegations that it actually started in China, perhaps as
long as 3 thousand years ago. Who knows for sure? Nobody.

After all, we know that people were playing board games in Ur in
4000 BC. It's not at all unreasonable to believe that these
board games were modeled on warfare as practiced in those ancient
times.

Chaturanga became a two-handed game called shatanj, which is
the Arabic word. It spread from India to Persia and Arabia and by the 9th century it reached Europe. Europe changed some of the pieces to fit European culture.

For example, the bishop started out as a elephant -- as essential
for warfare in South and Southeast Asia, but not much used in
Europe! In the late 15th century the alfil -- the Arabic word --
became the bishop and gained the power to slide an unlimited
distance over diagonals.

Pawns started out as foot soldiers, not much different.

The queen started out as the king's chief advisor, or mantri or
vizier. This advisor became the more logical queen to the king
in Europe, and in the 15th century became a much stronger piece.
The advisor -- or fers in Arabic -- became the queen

Indian cavalry became the knights. The chariots became the rook.

The last time chess changed, it was the end of the 15th century.

A version of a chess game has been excavated from a Viking
grave site off Brittany.

Most of the books say that it was a game played by the
nobility for hundreds of years, because ordinary people didn't
have time for it.

I'm sure the average peasant couldn't devote their life to it,
but I suspect that some of those peasants probably played a
mean game of chess in the little spare time they had.

Interestingly, the French dominated chess for many years.
It was Francois Andre Danican Philidor who wrote an early
chess classic, "L'analyse du jeu des Echecs" in 1749.

Benjamin Franklin wrote the first book on chess in America.
He was an expert player who believed that chess was like life.

Howard Staunton designed the standard chess pieces we use now,
around the 1840s.

The first international chess tournament was the London Tourney
of 1851, won by Adolf Andersen of Germany.

The international governing body of chess, Federation Internationale
des Echecs, or FIDE for short, was founded in 1924.

In the U.S., the U.S. Chess Federation was founded to promote
the game.

It's interesting that shatanj didn't just disappear -- it
not only spread to Europe and became chess, it spread throughout
Asia and became:

Sittuyin (Burmese Chess)
Mak-ruk (Siamese Chess)
Shiang K'i (Chinese Chess)
Changgi -- Korean Chess
Sho-gi (Japanese Chess or The General's Game)

You can also check out my other chess blogs --
chess theory pdf, play chess online, and
Russian chess masters