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Chess

Chess is a recreational and competitive game played between two players. It involves players using their mental capacities instead to the extreme of beating the other player. Truly a battle of the wits, chess is often known as the game of the kings. At high levels of play, chess games are often recorded down with their moves known as chess notations. From left to right in white's perspective, it's numbered 1 through 8 with a white square on the bottom right. From bottom top in white's perspective it's lettered a-h with a white square on the top left of the board.

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History

It has been around for a very long time. It’s traditionally played on 64 squares arranged 8 x 8 with 32 white squares and 32 black squares. Originally, the game came from Persia and India but later on transformed in the 15th century in Eastern Europe. Chess is one of the most popular games, played by millions of players worldwide, at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence and in tournaments. Each player starts the game with 1 [[queen, 1 king, 2 rooks, 2 knights, 2 bishops and 8 pawns, totalling 16 pieces. There is also the counting of the pieces to determine who is winning. The king is priceless. The queen is worth 9 points. The rooks are worth 5 points each. The knights and bishops are worth 3 points each while the pawns are worth 1 point each. The object of the game is to force the king into checkmate so that it has no possible way to get out of it in the next move. Organized chess started in the 16th century and has developed extensively. Chess today is a recognized sport of the International Olympic Committee. The first World Chess Champion is Wilhelm Steinitz in 1886. The current champion is Viswanathan Anand. Extensive chess tactics and strategies have been developed since the game’s first becoming as art has been repeatedly found in chess puzzles.

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Rules

For rules of chess, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_chess

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Strategies and Tactics

Chess is found on the principle that whoever plans better in the long-term wins. While this is true for strategic maneuvers, tactical attacks – short term explosions, can also win games. These two goals are interrelated since without the proper tactical ideas, strategic maneuvers cannot happen and without the previous strategy of play, effective tactical explosions cannot occur. A game of chess is usually divided into three phases: opening – usually 10-25 moves, middlegame – the fiercest part of the game and endgame – where most of the pieces are gone and kings take part of the game. Pawns, when reached the last rank, can promote to any piece they want, thereby the farther the pawn is up the board, the stronger it is.

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Opening

A chess opening is an initial group of moves designed to begin the system of play. There is plenty of opening theory - moves that have been played before that has been accepted into databases for other players to repeat. Also, four fundamental strategic aims are present: Development - To develop the pieces so they will have an impact on the game Control of the Center - To control the center of the board for more freedom and cramp on the opponent King Safety - To protect the king from dangerous situations - castling usually aids this process Pawn Structure - To strive to stop weaknesses from occurring in your base camp while striving to create as many weaknesses in your opponents as possible. Most players agree that white has a small advantage since he starts the game while black is trying to equalize the position first before going for the win.

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Middlegame

The middlegame is the moment of the game where players are striving to exchange pieces favorably and try to gain an advantage. Typical ideas begin with an attack on the king. Usually the king is castled on the kingside so players will often try to gain a superiority in numbers on the kingside to facilitate an attack. If such an attack is successful, usually the game will end very soon with a resignation - giving up, a mating attack - whereby the king gets checkmated, or by a large win in material for the attacker - meaning that the attacker gains a superiority overall on the board characterized by the counting of pieces. If let's say at the end of the combination - a number of tactical blows, you end up with one queen, one rook, two bishops and seven pawns while your opponent only have one queen and five pawns. You will have (9) + (5) + (6) + (7), ending up with 27 points while your opponent will have (9) + (5) with only 14 points. Such a vast difference in points will likely decide the result of the game Another idea in the middlegame is to proceed quietly and attack the pawns instead of the king. Such an idea is reminiscent of typical positional play. While an attack on the king is based on tactical opportunities, an attack on the pawns is a long-term strategic outlook on the position. While both players may end up with the same amount of material and pawns at the end of a attack on the pawns, the pawn weaknesses may decide the game in the long-term.

An attack on the king usually suits the aggressive and action-type players while the attack on the pawns usually suits a calm and reserved thinker, content with small blows to the position at hand.

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Endgame

The endgame is the last part of the game and here an attack on the pawns may give way to a win in the endgame. Since during the endgame, pawns become more important as there are less pieces on the board to harass them, pawns naturally becomes stronger. The king also, the cowardly royal who had to hide behind his pawns to protect him from kingside attacks is a much stronger piece as less pieces are on the board to harass him as well. These two factors can sometimes influence the game dramatically just based on how many pawns you have, where your pawns are placed, how far your pawns are up the board and where your king is.

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Cultural Impact

While chess has never gained the immense amount of popularity that [[poker has taken up, chess is still a part of noble culture. Noblemen in the middle ages used to play the game of chess to determine who was more smarter and therefore better than the other person while ego wars were often settled with a game of chess. Benjamin Franklin even played the game and commented on how impressively logical chess is and how it teaches people not to be too hasty and other lessons that can be easily applied in life. Chess has been readily taught in school for some time now with USSR and now Russia popularizing it around the world. The national body of chess is FIDE - International Federation of Chess while the body of chess in Canada is the CFC - Chess Federation of Canada. The most famous person possible to impact chess is Bobby Fischer, the 11th world champion from USA in 1972. When he won the champion away from the USSR, the height of the cold war was at its highest and with his win, the popularity for chess heightened to new levels. Chess boards were sold at quadrupled the price. Everyone played chess, from coffee shops to libraries to even sports arenas. Chess was at its highest. However, when he failed to defend his title in 1975, chess blew up and popularity sunk down.

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Titles and Rankings

Chess has an elaborate title and ranking system in play.

Grandmaster - highest level of play besides that of World Champion. An elo rating of 2500+ is needed to get it. There are less than a thousand GM's in the world with millions of people playing the game. International Master - 2nd highest, an elo rating of 2400+ is needed to get it. Fide Master- third highest, an elo rating of 2300+ is needed to get it. Candidate Master - fourth highest, an elo rating of 2200+ is needed to get it.

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Relation to Computer Science

Chess has not been solved thus yet while checker has. Computers are constantly on the move to try to solve chess using mainly brute force. When the first computer chess program was created, it was very weak in comparison to grandmasters and so programmers constantly tried to improve it. The first program ever to beat a world champion was Deep Blue, a super computer programmed by IBM in 1997 against then reigning world champion Garry Kasparov. The win was controversial however as the machine beat the champion 3.5-2.5 which the champion decided to complain about - not because of the score but because he suspected human help was behind the win. However, nothing came out of that and so chess programs continued to thrive. Nowadays, chess programs are run on normal processes fit for a laptop or desktop so players can enjoy it without the huge costs and processing speed of super computers. Chess is also closely related with math in that combinatorial and topological problems are in play. Also, the limit of legal positions in chess is estimated to be between 10⁴³ and 10⁵⁰ while an average position can have 30-40 moves to the limit of 218!

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