The History of Chess

The game of chaturanga, named for the four divisions of an Indian army — infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariotry — emerged in India by around 600 AD. It is the earliest recognizable ancestor of chess, with pieces corresponding to the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook.

Location: Northern India

The game passed to Sasanian Persia as chatrang and then to the Islamic world as shatranj, where it became a fixture of court and scholarly life. Al-Adli and as-Suli wrote the earliest treatises on the game in the 9th and 10th centuries, recording openings, endgames, and the first great players — the oldest surviving literature of chess.

Location: Abbasid Caliphate, Baghdad

Chess spread into Europe through Moorish Spain, Sicily, and Italy, becoming by the High Middle Ages a central pastime of knightly culture across the continent. The Muslim-aligned piece names were transformed — the vizier became the queen, the elephant the bishop — and the game accumulated the moralized allegorical literature of medieval courts.

Location: Iberia and Italy

Around 1475–1500, rule changes in southern Europe — sometimes called "mad queen chess" — gave the queen and bishop their modern long-range moves, making the game far faster and more dynamic. Luis Ramírez de Lucena's 1497 book is the oldest surviving printed chess text, and the new game spread rapidly across Europe, displacing shatranj within a generation.

Location: Southern Europe

The first international chess tournament, held alongside the Great Exhibition, was won by Adolf Anderssen of Germany. Standardized rules, competitive organization, and chess journalism followed, turning chess from a salon pastime into an organized international sport.

Location: London, UK

Wilhelm Steinitz defeated Johannes Zukertort in the first match recognized as a world championship, becoming the first official world chess champion and establishing the title structure that continues to the present. Steinitz also founded positional chess theory, the first scientific school of the game.

Location: USA

Vera Menchik won the first Women's World Chess Championship, a title she held until her death in 1944 while defeating many of the top male masters of her era. Later, Judit Polgár, the strongest woman player in history, broke into the world top ten in 2003 and defeated eleven world champions in her career without ever entering the women's title.

Location: London, UK

American Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky to become world champion, breaking 24 years of Soviet dominance in a match broadcast globally as a Cold War spectacle. Fischer's subsequent withdrawal from competitive chess and his 1975 forfeit of the title to Anatoly Karpov became part of the match's enduring legend.

Location: Reykjavik, Iceland

IBM's Deep Blue defeated reigning world champion Garry Kasparov 3½–2½ in a six-game rematch, the first loss of a match by a sitting world champion to a computer under tournament conditions. Kasparov accused IBM of human intervention during the games, a charge IBM denied; the company declined a rematch and retired the machine. The match is a landmark in computing history — a decade before AI beat humans at Go.

Location: New York, USA

DeepMind's AlphaZero, given only the rules of chess, taught itself the game through self-play in a matter of hours and defeated Stockfish, then the strongest conventional engine, in a 100-game match. The result, published in Science in 2018, demonstrated that general reinforcement learning could surpass systems built on centuries of accumulated human chess theory.

Location: London, UK

The Netflix series The Queen's Gambit, pandemic lockdowns, and the rise of streaming combined to drive record growth in online chess, with platforms like chess.com and Lichess reporting surges in new players and the game reaching its largest global audience in history. In 2024, Gukesh Dommaraju of India became the youngest world champion at 18, part of the game's fastest-growing national school.

Location: Global