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 recorded history of chess goes back at least to the emergence of a similar game, chaturanga, in seventh-century India. The rules of chess as we know them today emerged in Europe at the end of the 15th century, with standardization and universal acceptance by the end of the 19th century. 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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Vera Francevna Mencikova (Russian: Вера Францевна Менчик, Vera Frantsevna Menchik; Czech: Věra Menčíková; 16 February 1906 – 26 June 1944), was a Russian-born Czechoslovak chess player who primarily resided in England. She was the first Women's World Chess Champion from 1927 to 1944 and the longest-reigning women's champion in history. Her eight world championship wins are the most of all time, and only Emanuel Lasker had a longer reign as world champion.

Menchik was born in Moscow to a Czech father and English mother. She played her first chess tournament in school at age 14 after having to switch to an integrated school during the Russian Revolution. Because of the revolution, her family left Russia and Menchik moved to Hastings, England in 1921. She joined the Hastings Chess Club in 1923 and began training with James Drewitt, the club champion, and Géza Maróczy, a past contender for the World Championship. Menchik established herself as the best female player in the country by defeating the British women's champion Edith Charlotte Price in two matches in 1925 two years before winning the inaugural Women's World Chess Championship in 1927. A year later, she became the first woman to compete in master-level tournaments. After her first big success at Ramsgate in 1929 when she shared second place with Akiba Rubinstein, Menchik was regularly invited to these elite events for the next decade, including the local Hastings Congress. Her best result in the Hastings Premier tournament was in 1931/32 when she defeated future world champion Max Euwe and Mir Sultan Khan to finish in joint fifth place out of ten. When Menchik was already a five-time Women's World Champion, she played and won the first-ever Women's World Championship match in 1937 against Sonja Graf, the consensus second-best female player of her era. One of her last big achievements was winning a match against Jacques Mieses in 1942 late in their careers. Menchik was active up until her death in 1944, when she was killed in a German air raid that destroyed her home with a flying bomb during the Second World War. (Full article...)

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General images

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

Image 1Bobby Fischer vs. Mikhail Tal (from History of chess)
Image 2Gustaf Lundberg, 1775, Portrait of Gustav Badin, pastel, 74 x 57 cm, Nationalmuseum, Sweden (from Chess in the arts)
Image 3In 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 4Edward Harrison May, 1867, Lady Howe mating Benjamin Franklin (from Chess in the arts)
Image 5Krishna and Radha playing chaturanga on an 8×8 Ashtāpada (from History of chess)
Image 6Chess Set by Man Ray (from Chess in the arts)
Image 7Antonis Mor, 1549, Von Sachsen vs. a Spaniard (from Chess in the arts)
Image 8Stamp of the USSR devoted to the accomplished Estonian player and analyst Paul Keres, 1991 (from History of chess)
Image 9Lucas van Leyden, c. 1508, The Game of Chess, oil on oak, 27 x 35 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (from Chess in the arts)
Image 10Karel van Mander, 1600 (attributed to), Les joueurs d'échecs (from Chess in the arts)
Image 11Shams-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 12Chess game between Tha'ālibī and Bakhazari, 1896 painting by Ludwig Deutsch (from History of chess)
Image 13Moors from Andalusia playing chess, Book of Games by King Alfonso X, 1283 (from Chess in the arts)
Image 14Bauhaus chess set by Josef Hartwig (from Chess in the arts)
Image 15The 12th-century Lewis chessmen in the collection of the National Museum of Scotland (from History of chess)
Image 16A Chess Dispute (1903) (from Chess in the arts)
Image 17Moors from Andalusia playing chess, Book of Games by King Alfonso X, 1283 (from History of chess)
Image 18RZA at a Hip Hop Chess Federation Tournament (from Chess in the arts)
Image 19Book of the customs of men and the duties of nobles or the Book of Chess (1473) (from Chess in the arts)
Image 20Niccolò di Pietro, 1413–15, The Conversion of Saint Augustin, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon (from Chess in the arts)
Image 21Richard Creifelds, c. 1886, The Veterans, Brooklyn Museum (from Chess in the arts)
Image 22Animation of the Immortal Game, in which Adolf Anderssen, playing white, beat Lionel Kieseritzky in June 1851 (from History of chess)
Image 23World Champions José Raúl Capablanca (left) and Emanuel Lasker in 1925 (from History of chess)
Image 24Iranian shatranj set, glazed fritware, 12th century, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (from History of chess)
Image 25Georgian writers, Ilia Chavchavadze and Ivane Machabeli playing chess in Saint Petersburg, 1873 (from Chess in the arts)
Image 26Paris Bordone, c. 1545, Chess players, oil on canvas, Mailand, Wohnhaus (from Chess in the arts)
Image 27Liberale da Verona, The Chess Players, c. 1475 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) (from Chess in the arts)
Image 28Sofonisba Anguissola, The Chess Game, 1555, National Museum, Poznań, Poland (from Chess in the arts)
Image 29Some 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 30Persian manuscript from the 14th century describing how an ambassador from India brought chess to the Persian court (from History of chess)
Image 31John Lavery, 1929, The Chess Players (from Chess in the arts)
Image 32Honoré Daumier, 1863, The Chess Players (from Chess in the arts)
Image 33Current World Champion Magnus Carlsen (from History of chess)
Image 34Hans Muelich, 1552, Duke Albrecht V. of Bavaria and his wife Anna of Austria playing chess (from Chess in the arts)
Image 35The Chess Players by Henry Fox Talbot, 1847 (from History of chess)
Image 36Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official World Chess Champion (from History of chess)
Image 37Thomas Eakins, 1876, The Chess Players (from Chess in the arts)

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FIDE world ranking

Rank	Player	Rating
1	Magnus Carlsen	2852
2	Ian Nepomniachtchi	2795
3	Ding Liren	2788
4	Alireza Firouzja	2785
5	Anish Giri	2768
5	Hikaru Nakamura	2768
7	Fabiano Caruana	2766
8	Wesley So	2761
9	Viswanathan Anand	2754
10	Teimour Radjabov	2747
11	Levon Aronian	2745
	Richard Rapport	2745
	Alexander Grischuk	2745
14	Leinier Dominguez	2743
15	Shakhriyar Mamedyarov	2738
16	Maxime Vachier-Lagrave	2736
17	Nodirbek Abdusattorov	2731
18	Gukesh D	2730
18	Vidit Santosh Gujrathi	2730
20	Dmitry Andreikin	2729
20	Yu Yangyi	2729
*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?

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