A short history of chess
Published
Chess has changed far more than most players realise. The pieces you move on this site would have been recognisable a thousand years ago, but the queen and bishop moved very differently, and the game was much slower. This page sticks to the parts of the story that historians broadly agree on. Where the early record is thin, it says so rather than filling the gaps with legend.
Origins in India
The earliest clear ancestor of chess is the Indian game chaturanga, which most historians place in the Gupta period, around the sixth century AD. The name refers to the four divisions of an ancient army: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots. Those became the pawns, knights, bishops and rooks. It was played on an eight by eight board and already had the key feature that sets chess apart from older race and capture games: one piece, the king, whose loss decides the game.
Many earlier origin stories exist, including the popular legend of the inventor who asked for grains of rice doubling on each square. Those stories are entertaining, but they are legends, not history.
Shatranj in Persia and the Arab world
The game spread to Persia, where it became chatrang and later, after the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, shatranj. Shatranj became very popular across the Islamic world. Strong players were known by name, and they wrote down problems and studied endings in a way that later European chess would build on. Several words in modern chess come from this route. "Checkmate" comes from the Persian shah mat, usually translated as "the king is helpless" or "the king is stuck", and "rook" comes from the Persian rukh.
The pieces were weaker than today. The piece in the queen's place, the counsellor, moved only one square diagonally. The piece in the bishop's place, the elephant, jumped exactly two squares diagonally. With such short-range pieces, games were long and an opening took many moves to develop.
Arrival in Europe
Chess reached Europe through contact with the Islamic world, most importantly through Spain and Italy, and it was known in parts of western Europe by around the year 1000. Over the following centuries the pieces took on European identities. The counsellor became a queen, and the elephant became a bishop in English, though other languages chose other names; in French it is the fou and in German the Läufer.
One of the best-known medieval sources is the book of games commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile in 1283, which describes chess alongside dice and other board games.
The modern queen and the faster game
The biggest single change happened late in the fifteenth century, probably in Spain or Italy. The queen gained her modern move, any distance in any straight direction, and the bishop gained its long diagonal move. Pawns gained the option of a two-square first move. Chess became dramatically faster and sharper, and players at the time sometimes called it the "new" or "queen's" game.
Printed chess books followed quickly. The Spanish writer Luis Ramírez de Lucena published one around 1497 that already describes the new rules. In the sixteenth century the Spanish priest Ruy López de Segura wrote a book of his own, and the opening still called the Ruy Lopez (see our openings page) carries his name. Castling and en passant took longer to settle and varied by region before becoming standard.
Coffee houses and the first champions
By the eighteenth century chess had centres in coffee houses, with Paris's Café de la Régence the most famous. The French player and composer François-André Danican Philidor became the best-known player of his age and wrote an influential book that stressed the importance of pawns, an idea that still shapes how players think about structure.
In 1851 London hosted what is generally considered the first international chess tournament, which the German player Adolf Anderssen won. A few years later the American Paul Morphy toured Europe and beat the leading players; his game at the Paris Opera in 1858 is in our example games.
The first match recognised as being for the world championship was played in 1886, when Wilhelm Steinitz beat Johannes Zukertort. Steinitz is also remembered for arguing that attacks should be built on positional advantages rather than launched on hope, an approach that changed how the game was played at the top.
The twentieth century
The international chess federation, FIDE, was founded in Paris in 1924. In 1948 it took over the organisation of the world championship. Soviet players dominated the title for most of the following decades, starting with Mikhail Botvinnik. The best-known exception came in 1972, when the American Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky in Reykjavík in a match followed far beyond the chess world.
In 1970 FIDE adopted the Elo rating system, devised by the physicist Arpad Elo, which estimates playing strength from results and is still the basis of ratings today. Over the same period algebraic notation, the system used on this site, replaced the older descriptive notation in most countries.
Computers
People tried to build chess machines long before electronic computers. Once computers existed, chess became a standard test for them. In 1997 IBM's Deep Blue won a six-game match against the reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, the first time a computer had beaten a world champion in a match under standard tournament conditions. Today free chess engines that run on a phone are far stronger than any human, and players use them to check their games.
The computer opponent on this site is much more modest. It runs inside your browser, and you choose its strength with the Easy, Normal and Hard settings.
Recent decades
The internet changed how most people play. Online play made it possible to find an opponent at any hour, and online servers now host far more games every day than over-the-board events. At the top level, Magnus Carlsen of Norway held the world championship from 2013 until 2023, when he chose not to defend it. Ding Liren of China won the title in 2023, and Gukesh Dommaraju of India took it from him in 2024.
What stayed the same
Across all of these changes the core of the game has held: two armies, one king each, and a win that comes from trapping the king rather than capturing everything. The words on this page that come from chess's long route, such as checkmate, rook and gambit, are collected with their meanings in the chess glossary.