Chess

The game of chess was first created in India about 1500 years ago.

It then spread across Asia and into Europe and evolved to it's current form about 1500 CE.

From the late 18th century, different playing styles have been dominating.

They appeared in the following order; romantic, scientific, hypermodern and new dynamism.

Modern chess tournaments began in the late 1800s and the first chess world championship was held in 1886.

In 1997, chess computer "Deep Blue" was the first computer to beat the current world champion, Garri Kasparov.

Since then, computers have been superior human beings in the game of chess.

In the 21st century, playing chess online has become popular, with a boom in 2020, due to the pandemic.

Over 30 million people plays chess online on chess.com.

The avarage rating of chess players is 740. Masters have a rating of 2000 or higher.

The highest rated player is Magnus Carlsen with a rating of 2859 at the moment.

The strongest chess computer today, Stockfish 15, has a rating of 3650.

The weirdest chess rule, en passant, was created to balance out new movement rules for pawns.
It is also said that it would prevent certain openings from being extremely good because of these new rules.

There are about 1720 grandmasters in chess today.

One of the first chess computers was "Mac Hack VI", at the level of an amateur.

Different methods for searching includes minimax search, often combined with alpha-beta pruning,
Monte Carlo tree search and transposition tables.

Today, the most well-known chess computers are Stockfish, AlphaZero/Leela-chess and Komodo.

Tools used by chess engines includes opening books, endgame tablebases and neural networks.

In late 2018, AlphaZero and Stockfish faced of in a chessmatch of 1000 games,
and AlphaZero crushed Stockfish through winning 155 games to 6. The other 839 games were draws.

Some grandmasters, for example Magnus Carlsen, has played against multiple people at the same time,
sometimes blindfolded, and won most of the games.

The longest chess game in history was 269 moves and took over 20 hours to complete. It still ended in a draw.

The longest game in a world championship match was 136 moves long. It was Magnus Carlsen who beat
Ian Nepomniachtchi in a 8 hour long game in 2021.
It was a crazy endgame where Ian resigned, after promotion from Carlsen was unstoppable.

The biggest chess channel is Gothamchess, with 1.37 million subscribers on Youtube

Some of top grandmasters in the game of chess today are :

- Magnus Carlsen - World Chess Champion, highest rated chess player ever.

- Hikaru Nakamura - Winner of the Speed chess championchip 5 times in a row.

- Fabiano Caruana - Challenger of the World Championchip title in 2018.

- Ian Nepomniachtchi - Challenger of the World Championchip title in 2021 and 2023.

- Ding Liren - Challenger of the World Championchip title in 2023.

- Alireza Firouzja - Youngest chess player surpassing a rating of 2800.

- Viswanathan Anand - The world champion before Magnus Carlsen, and the first grandmaster from India.

Still, there are a lot more of top grandmasters that are not covered here.

There are a lot of chess content creators, and even if they use all sorts of social media,
the best platforms to learn chess are Youtube or Twitch.

Some of the biggest chess channels are :

- Gothamchess - IM Levy Rozman

- GmHikaru - GM Hikaru Nakamura

- Daniel Naroditsky - GM Daniel Naroditsky

In different social media, you can find anything from short clips from top level games,
to chess lessons or rating speedruns.

Fide, the international chess federation, is the organizor of most tournaments at the top level.

Though, there are a lot of tournaments organized by other groups, especially for lower rated players.

There are multiple world championchips in chess, in different time classes.
Though the most important is the World Chess Championchip with a longer time control.

There are different formats in tournaments, for example round robin, where everyone plays against everyone.
There is also competitions with a group stage and a following knockout stage, as in many other sports.

To get a grandmaster title, you need to have a high enough rating of 2500,
but also performing good enough in three different tournaments at high enough levels.

The two biggest chess websites today are chess.com and lichess.org

Both of them are free to use, but at chess.com, if you pay for premium,
you can use more of the website and more often.

At these websites, you can play games of chess, against other humans or bots, solve chess problems,
analyze your games, play chess variants and much more.

At the website "OpeningTree.com", you can explore your own and other players opening stats.

There are a lot of websites online, that teaches people openings, for example chessable.
If you want to learn how to play your openings, this is a good way of doing it.

Some of these websites also offer middlegame and endgame lessons,
but most of these websites requires you to pay for most of their content.

Though, some people uses chess engines to cheat online, which of course is banned if discovred.

Pawns can only move forward, one step at the time.

If a pawn hasn't moved yet, it can move two steps forward in one move.

If there is a piece in front of a pawn, it can't move.

If a piece of the opposing color is standing in front of a pawn diagonally, the pawn can capture it.

Castling is when you move the king two steps towards a rook of the same color,
and the rook move to the other side of the king.

Castling is only allowed if neither the king nor the rook it's trying to castle with has moved yet.

To castle, all squares between the king and the rook needs to be empty.

If the king is in check, or is going to be in check during or after castling, castling is illegal.

En passant is possible when a pawn moves two steps and lands beside one of your pawns.
Then you can take the pawn as if it only had moved one step instead of two.

En passant is only possible the move immediatly after the pawn moved two steps forward, then it becomes unavailable to play.

En passant means "in passing", and means that you capture the pawn (with your pawn) when it passes by you.

En passant is one of the most discussed chess rules in the history of the game,
and in some countries it wasn't even implemented until many years after the invention of the move.

Promotion happens when a pawn lands on the other side of the board

When a pawn promotes, it can become any other piece except for a king.

The most common piece to promote to is the queen, since it is the most powerful piece on the board.

You can also promote through capturing another piece.

If you play chess in real life, sometimes you don't have enough queens to place on the board,
if you promote multiple pawns.

A king is in check if a piece of the opposing color can capture it.

If a king is in check, and there is no move that can take it out of check,
it is simply checkmate.

If a player is checkmated, he/she loses the game and the other player wins.

If you think that you will lose a game,
you can resign the game instead of waiting for the other player to checkmate you.

If a player runs out of time, the other player wins on time.
This is only possible if the other player has material enough to deliver checkmate.

For grandmasters, the most common way to win a game is by resignation.

If there are no moves that doesn't put your king in check when you aren't in check, the game is a draw by stalemate.

If no player has material enough to checkmate the other player, the game is a draw by "insufficient material".

A player can offer the opponent a draw, and if the opponent accepts, the game is a draw by agreement.

Draws by agreement is the most common way for grandmasters to draw a game.

If 50 moves per player has passed without any captures or pawnmoves, the game is a draw by the 50-move rule.

If the same position is repeated three times, a player can claim a draw, but it isn't a draw per automatic.
If en passant was possible the first time the position was on the board, it doesn't count towards the three times.

If a player runs out of time and the opponent doesn't have enough material to checkmate,
the game is a draw by timeout and insufficient material.

A common way for grandmasters to draw is to shuffle their pieces back and forth to make a draw by repetition.

If you are in check after your move, the move is illegal.

This means that you can't move your king next to your opponents king.

This also means that if you are in check, you have to get out of check.

It also means that your opponent can't win by you missing that you were in check.

There are three ways to get out of check :
- Move your king out of check
- Block the check with one of your pieces
- Take the piece that is checking you

Gothamchess GMHikaru Agadmator Daniel Naroditsky Eric Rosen Chess Talk

Chess.com Lichess.org OpeningTree Chessbase Openings FIDE Chessable