Chess is experiencing a huge surge in popularity, with legions of new fans being introduced to the ancient strategy game through an array of new digital platforms and the smash-hit success of the Netflix drama series, The Queen’s Gambit.
Since its release in October, The Queen’s Gambit has been watched by over 62 million households. It tells the story of a fictional chess prodigy, Beth Harmon, and her rise to become the strongest player in the world. Now Google searches for “How to Play Chess” are at a 10-year high, Chess set sales are booming, and the world’s largest online chess community, chess.com, is reporting record membership with over 100,000 new players joining each day.
Now Google searches for “How to Play Chess” are at a 10-year high, Chess set sales are booming, and the world’s largest online chess community, chess.com, is reporting record membership with over 100,000 new players joining each day.
Interested in testing yourself in this complex game of strategy, logic, and imagination? Read on for everything you wanted to know about Chess.
Why Play Chess?
“Chess is a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe.”
This Indian Proverb captures something of the unique appeal of chess, a game accessible to beginners yet endlessly fascinating for experienced masters.
Chess is a game for all ages. Sergey Karjakin became the youngest ever Grandmaster – the highest title a player can achieve – at the age of 12. Bobby Fischer was USA Champion at 14 and a Grandmaster by 15, and current World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen, still only 30, earned the Grandmaster title at 13.
These feats are mirrored in The Queen’s Gambit, as the young Beth Harmon takes the chess world by storm in her teenage years, defeating seasoned Grandmasters on her way to national and international victories.
“Prodigy” is a common term in chess, and it is never too early to begin!
At the same time, older players can still achieve the highest levels, as Viktor Korchnoi proved when he won the Swiss national championship at the age of 80. Players have achieved the Grandmaster title well after their 70th birthday, giving hope to those starting out a little later in life!
Chess rewards skill, concentration, and imagination, and is open to any age. There is no better game to bring generations together.
Bringing People Together
Chess pays no attention to gender, religion, or ethnicity. Nor does it matter how rich you are. In 2019 an 8-year-old refugee from Nigeria, Tani Adewumi won the New York State Championship while living in a homeless shelter.
Phiona Mutesi was living in one of Uganda’s poorest slums, and had dropped out of school without learning how to read or write. She was taught chess by a missionary when she was nine, and within four years she became an international chess champion. Her remarkable story inspired the Disney film Queen of Katwe.
Hungary’s female chess champion Judit Polgár recently celebrated the increasing popularity of the game among young women inspired by Beth Harmon. Chess.com has recorded a 15% increase in women on the online platform, reaching its highest ever proportion of women players.
As you will see in our section on the history of chess, the game has evolved through time with many diverse groups contributing new rules, strategies, and customs to shape the game we play today.
Chess is, and always has been, for everyone.
Benefits
Whenever and wherever you start, chess develops significant skills and benefits.
Players are constantly training and testing their cognitive abilities, concentration, and focus. They need to analyse the position, keep track of their opponent’s moves as well as their own, and always think ahead.
The intense focus required for this kind of thinking stimulates the pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain used for decision-making. Studies have shown that teenagers have an under-developed pre-frontal cortex, which can lead to difficulties in making well-informed decisions. As the game stimulates this area of the brain, scientists have suggested that you can become a better decision-maker by playing chess!
For younger players, chess introduces some important concepts:
- Beginners learn how to devise strategies.
- Chess tests and develops pattern recognition.
- It rewards forward-thinking, training players to think before they act.
- Players learn the importance of patience.
- Chess notation provides an introduction to the basics of mapping coordinates.
- Young players gain confidence as they put their mind, memory, and creativity to the test.
For the elderly, researchers have shown that chess can delay the progression of dementia in players over 75.
Starting out
So you’ve decided to give the game a try. Where do you start on your path to becoming a Grandmaster?
One of the great things about chess is its accessibility. It is cheap to start playing – the only requirements are a chess board and a set of pieces.
If you wanted to play for free you could draw and colour a 64-square grid on a sheet of paper, and create chess pieces from a cereal packet! But if that sounds a bit tricky, basic chess sets can be found for under £10.
Basic moves
The first thing you’ll need to learn are the moves of the various chess pieces.
Pawns can move only one square forward in a straight line along their file, or two squares on their first move. They can only capture one square diagonally forwards. If a pawn reaches the opponent’s end of the board it can be converted into any other piece.
Bishops can move any number of squares diagonally.
Knights can move in an L-shape, in any one and two square combination. They are the only piece that can “jump over” other pieces.
Rooks can move any number of squares up and down and side to side.
Queens can move any number of squares up and down, diagonally, and side to side.
Kings can move one space in any direction.
The aim of the game is to capture your opponent’s king by putting it into “checkmate”, meaning that it is attacked by one of the opposition pieces but has no safe square to move to.
Chess Notation
The moves of the pieces in a game can be recorded using chess notation.
Squares: From left-to-right from White’s viewpoint, the squares are labelled alphabetically with letters from ‘a’ through to ‘h’. Each square also gets a number, from ‘1’ to ‘8’. The squares in the row closest to the White player in the initial setup are ‘1’ squares, the next row the ‘2’ squares and so on… to the rank closest to Black, which are ‘8’ squares.
We now have everything we need to give all 64 squares a unique letter and number combination.
Pieces: The pieces are identified by their initial letter, except in the case of the Knight which is labelled ‘N’ since ‘K’ is allocated to the King.
Moves: A move is written as a combination of the piece which moves and the square it moves to, so Bg5 means that the bishop moves to the 7th square on the 5th rank.
As an extra complication, pawn moves do not use a letter, so the written move e4 means that a pawn has moved to the 5th square on the fourth rank.
Moves are usually written in pairs, showing both the White move and Black’s response – for instance, 1. e4 Nf6 shows that White used the first move to advance a pawn to e4, and Black answered by developing a knight to f6.
Basic strategies
Here are some important strategies that will help you improve as a beginner:
- Try to command the centre of the board. Think of those middle squares as the high ground of the battlefield – if you control the centre it is easier to control the game.
- Start the game by occupying the central squares with your pawns, then move your knights and bishops to squares where they can control the centre.
- Prioritise the king’s safety. Castling with the rook can help. Under certain conditions you can move the king two squares towards the rook, and move the rook to the other side of the king. This means that the king is transferred to a safe place in the corner of the board.
- Consider the relative value of pieces when exchanging them with your opponent. Chess pieces have been assigned point values based on their relative strength. A pawn is worth 1 point, knights and bishops are worth 3 points, a rook is worth 5 points, and a Queen is worth 9 points. So don’t go exchanging your queen for a knight!
- Bobby Fischer recommended pawn to e4 as the best opening move, but computer software has calculated d4 as the opening move most likely to lead to a win. Experiment and see what works best for you. The possibilities are limitless, and sometimes the best move might be something unexpected!
Playing Games
So, you have a chessboard and a set of pieces, you understand how they move, and you’re ready to start. Where should you go next?
Many schools run chess clubs, recognising the educational value of the game. Chess is included on the national curriculum in Albania, and countries like China and Russia integrate chess into national schools programmes.
Online tutorials can help develop your skills and prepare you for competitive play. There are many excellent introductory videos on YouTube, including the Chess.com series Everything You Need To Know About Chess and Bright Side’s How to Play Chess: The Complete Guide for Beginners.
Chess.com, Lichess and chess24 are online platforms offering a wide range of training tools and tactical puzzles for beginners. Once you have grasped the basics, these online platforms allow you to test yourself against other players in real time, matching you with opponents of your own level.
As you battle your way through the millions of users on Chess.com you might stumble across a Grandmaster like Magnus Carlsen or Hikaru Nakamura, both of whom have active accounts and stream their games online.
Local chess clubs offer another route to regular play, providing a welcoming and supportive network for players to connect, compete and socialise.
The (Ancient!) History of Chess
Chess has a rich cultural heritage, and for over 1500 years its rules and gameplay have been shaped by the contributions of diverse historical groups across the world. To each of these groups the game has held a fascination, prized as a metaphor for human affairs, a tool for military strategy and tactical simulation, an allegory of social roles, a test of intelligence, and a benchmark for genius.
There are many legends about its origins.
Some have dated it back to the Warring States period of Ancient China, suggesting that a similar strategy board game was developed by commander Han Xin in the winter of 204 BC to prepare for an upcoming battle.
The ancient Indian strategy game Chaturanga is commonly hailed as an ancestor of chess. An apocryphal tale describes the invention of the game by a wise minister to teach his tyrant King that everyone in his kingdom had value.
From India the game migrated to Persia, where the modern rules and terms for “check” and “check mate” were developed. Medieval trade along the Silk Road carried the game to new places and peoples, who developed many local variants. The Japanese created Shogi, a version of the game which allowed captured pieces to return to the board on the side of the captor, while variations of chess were reportedly popular in the Mongol Empire.
Chess came to Europe from the East. In the Middle Ages it was regarded as a game of high culture and nobility, but during the Enlightenment it spread from royal courts to coffeehouses.
The Victorian era saw the dawn of modern chess, with Howard Staunton playing a key role in its development. Staunton published influential guidebooks, designed the modern chess pieces, and organised the first international chess tournament, held alongside the Great Exhibition in London’s Crystal Palace in 1851. One of the stars of Staunton’s era was the American prodigy Paul Morphy, whose swashbuckling style inspired a new generation of attacking players.
Chess was transformed in the early twentieth century by Cuban pioneer Capablanca and the Russian world champion Alexander Alekhine, who produced major innovations in openings and endgames. At mid-century Russia became increasingly dominant, as chess became a geopolitical battleground during the Cold War. From 1948 to 1972 the World Chess Champion was Russian, the title being held in turn by Mikhail Botvinnik (1948–1957), Vasily Smyslov (1957–1958), Mikhail Tal (1960–1961), Tigran Petrosian (1963–1969) and Boris Spassky (1969-1972).
Russia saw its unbroken record as proof of the Soviet Union’s intellectual superiority over the West, but in 1972 the spectacular American prodigy Bobby Fischer would unseat the reigning World Chess Champion, Boris Spassky. The ‘Match of the Century’ was a war of wits which in many ways represented the Cold War, where mind games had replaced military force.
Bobby Fischer had his own agenda. He was insistent that the tournament organisers should meet his every demand before taking part in the match. He would not play until the prize money was raised to $250,000, the biggest prize ever offered in chess, worth about $1.5 million today. He demanded the first rows of chairs at the competition be removed, that a new chessboard should be supplied, and that changes should be made to the venue’s lighting. And he insisted that he could not concentrate without an Eames executive chair. When Spassky saw his chair, he refused to play until he got one too.
In the first of 24 scheduled games a bad move left Fischer’s bishop trapped, and Spassky won.
Fischer blamed the cameras. He complained that he could hear them and that this broke his concentration. As no one else could hear the cameras, the organizers refused to remove them. In protest, Fischer did not turn up for the second game, and Spassky led by 2-0.
Fischer refused to play on unless the cameras were removed, and demanded that the match be moved to a small adjoining room. Finally, the tournament organizers gave in to all of his demands, and the match resumed. From game three onward, Fischer dominated Spassky and won six and a half out of the next eight games. The Russians thought the CIA might be poisoning Spassky. Samples of his orange juice were analysed, the chairs and lights were checked, and they tried to detect any beams and rays which could influence their player.
Finally, following the 21st game of the match, Spassky conceded the match and for the first time in 24 years someone had managed to beat the Russians in a World Chess Championship match.
The Queen’s Gambit
Fischer’s era forms the setting for The Queen’s Gambit, the record-breaking Netflix series bringing chess to a new generation.
Viewers around the world have been captivated by the story of Kentucky orphan Beth Harmon, who is taught how to play chess by the school caretaker in the basement of her boarding school before embarking on a sensational rise to the World Championship. The series provides a vivid picture of the 1950s and ‘60s, as Beth progresses through local and national tournaments before facing off against Grandmasters at international events in Paris and Moscow.
Since the premiere of The Queen’s Gambit in October interest in chess has exploded, especially among women.
Chess has trended on streaming platforms like Twitch, where Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura live-streams his online games to millions of viewers and subscribers. According to the analytics site SullyGnome, Twitch users watched over 41 million hours of chess between March and August, four times as many hours as in the previous six months. In June, an amateur chess tournament called PogChamps was the top-viewed stream on the platform.
The Botez Sisters Alexandra and Andrea have built a popular chess streaming channel on Twitch and YouTube, and their game against a blindfolded Nakamura has had over 1.3 million views.
A Digital Revolution
The digital revolution has transformed chess, opening up new horizons for players at every level. But it has also proved the limits of the human mind against machines.
In 1968 International Master David Levy made a $3,000 bet that no chess computer would beat him in 10 years. He won his bet, but in 1977 Michael Stean became the first grandmaster to lose to a computer.
Over the next 20 years increased computing speed and sophisticated programming strategies brought the top chess computers up to the standard of the best Grandmasters, and in 1997 IBM computer Deep Blue beat Russian World Champion Garry Kasparov, marking the advent of an era of computer dominance over human Grandmasters. Deep Blue was calculating 50 billion positions every 3 minutes. Kasparov was calculating 10 positions every 3 minutes.
Since the 1960s writers had speculated whether a computer could ever beat a human Grandmaster. Today we know that it is highly unlikely that a human will ever again beat the computer!
Chess in popular culture
Chess has a long history of famous players, fascinating scientists, writers, artists, politicians, actors, and musicians.
Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte were fans of the game, as were the writer Vladimir Nabokov and the artist Marcel Duchamp. The roll call of famous historical chess players includes Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Fidel Castro, Ray Charles, Stanley Kubrick, and Robin Williams. Julia Roberts and Madonna are some of today’s most famous celebrity chess players.
The game has captivated some of the greatest minds and most colourful characters in history. Today it could capture your imagination!
Did you know? The second book printed in English was The Game and Playe of the Chess
Did you know? The Queen used to be one of the weakest pieces on the board? Some suggest her development in the medieval era reflected the growing power of Queens around the world
