AnAn: A Brief History of Chess
Once a game played with human-like shapes and buried in the fathomless depths of history, chess has now become an exhilarating game with up to 250,000 new players every day.
BY ANAN LIU - NORTH GWINNETT MIDDLE SCHOOL
HER LEAGUE MEMBER & HER NEWS COLUMNIST
Two 13th century Spanish damsels playing chess on a checkered board from the book of Alfonso X The Wise. Courtesy of https://thomasguild.blogspot.com/2014/01/medieval-chess-boards.html
Beyond leagues of entertainment and sports, battlefields filled with checkered wooden patterns capture the imagination and creativity of millions. Players who are daring enough to venture into this systematic game find themselves engrossed in a strategic war with battle cries of “Checkmate” and the ensuing defeat of the opponent’s cavalry. This prevalent game started thousands of years ago. Once a game played with human-like shapes and buried in the fathomless depths of history, chess has now become an exhilarating game with up to 250,000 new players every day.
But when did chess become so popular? And how?
To begin our journey of chess history, we must first travel back almost three thousand years, to the 6th century C.E, where the Gupta dynasty has currently taken the throne. You’re a servant for the king of India, and just as you head to do your daily chores of sweeping, you hear the king conferring with a Grand Vizier. You know if you’re late for your chores, there’ll be consequences, but you can’t help pressing your ear against the door, especially not when you hear King Shirham clap his hands in delight, laughing. It turns out that the Grand Vizier Sissa Ben Dahir, the chief officer of the state, has just brought an extraordinary gift to the king, and from a crack in the wooden door, you can see that it’s a checkered board with figurines on it. Again, the king laughs in delight, and you overhear that this new game is called chaturanga, meaning four-limbed. More curious than ever, when the king and Sissa’s back is turned, you sneak in and marvel at one of the pieces. It’s labeled shah, meaning king, and it has a small but unmistakable cross on the top. The shah, along with the other pieces, are carved delicately, and you count about sixteen white pieces and sixteen black before you have to duck behind a tapestry as the king turns around. You hear the king bestow a gift to Sissa: whatever the Grand Vizier wanted, he could have. You see Sissa’s prideful and glowing face, and you brace yourself for some preposterous request, but Sissa merely asks King Shirham to place one grain of wheat on the first square of the chaturanga board, double it, and place it on the next square. King Shirham chuckles for the third time, and he immediately begins calculating how many grains he would need. Even you don’t think the amount will be very much. After all, you remember there were sixty-four squares when you glimpsed at the board. But after much time, you hear the answer, and it’s much too long for you to even remember. It’s more than eighteen quintillion grains, more than a decade’s harvest, and as Sissa leaves, laughing to himself, you see the king’s face first turn to anger, then to confusion, and finally to awe.
Now, our journey will take us hundreds of years after Sissa presented chaturanga. It’s the 16th century, and chess has just spread to other parts of the world, such as Spain, which is where one of the first masters of the game, Ruy Lopez, lived. In fact, Lopez was such a good player that now, almost five hundred years later, we still use one opening he analyzed and wrote about: the Ruy Lopez opening, or the Spanish Game. There are no opening books yet, and there certainly isn’t any theory to guide you. In fact, one of Lopez’s strategies for winning chess games was to play when the sun was glaring in your opponent’s eyes!
Speeding up a bit more from into the eighteenth to nineteenth century, chess began to develop more and more, with opening books coming into play. One of the first books was written by a French master, Francois-Andre Phillidor (creator of the famous opening, the Philidor Defense), whose books analyzed a few openings as well as pawn endgames. If you’ve ever heard the quote “The pawns are the soul of chess”, then you now know which chess master stated it. But opening books wasn't the only thing new to the chess world during these two hundred years. The reason we have time pressure, time management, bullet, blitz, and rapid time controls now is because of chess clocks! Chess clocks came into play in the nineteenth century. Earlier, without chess clocks, games could last for hours on end without a clear winner!
Next on our journey, it’s the era when chess really became widely known, when world championships started. It’s the twentieth century. This is the period of time when most of the legendary players we know claimed their trophies and dominated the chess world. Capablanca, Tal, Kasparov, and Fischer are just some of the names never to be erased from history. Some of these players also helped to develop chess computers, tools for analysis or worthy opponents over the board. One of these famous “fathers of computer chess” was Mikhail Botvinnik, a renowned chess trainer and avid world champion. He is now known for two of his remarkable feats: training not one, but three future world champions and helping to develop chess computers. Another Grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, who is still widely known today, was the first person in the twentieth century to heavily use computers for preparation. Garry was also the first chess master to defeat the supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996, in a match that would change history forever. The match ended in a score of 4-2, and Kasparov once again showed just how strong he was.
This remarkable timeline of chess has brought us to one final destination: our modern time, the twenty-first century. Social media platforms with streamers like GothamChess and the Botez sisters are adding on to the popularity of chess. In 2017, the most widely known online chess platform, chess.com, partnered with Twitch to stream more chess content. One of their first streamers was GM Hikaru, who has now helped more than eight million new players get to know chess. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, leaving many quarantined with little to do. In April of that year, chess.com saw a spike of 1.5 million new accounts. Additionally, a miniseries set in the Cold War-era, The Queen’s Gambit, came out in 2020. According to the CNN, more than 62 million households watched this film in just the first month after its release. With such a large viewership, many people have been compelled to try their hand at this captivating game. Faith Karimi, a senior writer for the CNN, stated, “In the first three weeks [after The Queen’s Gambit’s release] . . . books about chess leaped 603%. . . .” Juli Lennett, an industry adviser, said, “Before 2020 sales of chess books and chess sets had remained flat or declined for years.” The show also provides a better opportunity for women to get involved in the game. Earlier, chess was known to be more of a game suited for men, but the main protagonist, Beth Harmon, inspired many women to start playing the game. Girls are now becoming more and more keen to learn about this game, and many have risen to fame with the added support and encouragement from the film.
All in all, the history of chess is an enthralling journey across centuries, reflecting the evolution of both intellect and strategic thinking. Chess is now a ubiquitous language uniting all ages alike in a common interest, a battlefield with tactics, attacks, and defenses: the game of kings.