Chess

CHESS IS A board game and mental sport for two players. It is played on a square board of 8 rows (called ranks) and 8 columns (called files), giving 64 squares of alternating colour, light and dark, with each player having a light square at his bottom right when facing the board.

Each player begins the game with 16pieces that each move and capture other pieces on the board in a unique way: eight pawns, two knights, two bishops, two rooks, one queen and one king.

DO YOU KNOW

Blitz chess, a version of chess make use of a chess clock to limit the time control for each player.
Generally each side has three to fifteen minutes (five is common) for all of its moves.	An even faster version of chess is known as bullet chess or lightning chess.
Bullet chess's time controls are less than three minutes.	Speed chess requires the player to spend less time thinking because if the player's time runs out, he loses.

HISTORY OF CHESS

• Common view is that chess originated in India, since the Arabic, Persian, Greek, Portuguese and Spanish words for chess are all derived from the Sanskrit game Chaturanga. Moreover, in the past only India had all three animals, horse, camel and elephant, in its cavalry, which represent knight, bishop and rook in chess.
• One theory also says that chess arose from the similar game of Xiangqi (Chinese chess), or at least a predecessor thereof, existing in China since the 2nd century BC.
• Chess slowly spread westward to Europe and eastward as far as Japan.
• When chess entered the Muslim world, the names of its pieces retained their Persian forms but its name became shatranj that continued in Spanish as ajedrez and in Greek as zatrikion, but in most of Europe it was replaced by versions of the Persian word shah = "king".
• Reached Russia via Mongolia, where it was played at the beginning of the 7th century.
• Introduced into the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors in the 10th century.
• Its entrance into Europe is marked by changes to the rules, including changes to the moves of the bishops, pawns and queen, with the modern form emerging in the 19th century.
• 
  
  
  IMPORTANT CHESS COMPETITIONS
  • World Chess Championship
  • World Chess Solving Championship
  • World Junior Chess Championship
  • European Individual Championship
  • National Chess Championships
  • Spain's Linares chess tournament
  • Monte Carlo's Melody Amber tournament
  • Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting
  • Wijk aan Zee's Corus chess tournament
  
  
  ORIGIN OF CHESSTERMS
  
  Checkmate: This is the English rendition of shah mat, which is Persian for "the king is finished".
  
  Rook: From Sanskrit Rath which means "chariot", or Persian rukh which means "chariot" or "cheek" (part of the face). The piece resembles a siege tower. It is also believed to be named after the mythical Persian bird of great power called the roc. In India, the piece is more popularly called haathi, which means "elephant".
  
  Bishop: From the Persian pil ("the elephant"), but in Europe and the western part of the Islamic world people knew little or nothing about elephants (curiously, in Russia this piece is called slon, which is Russian for "elephant"). The name of the chessman entered Western Europe as Latin alfinus, a meaningless word that then evolved further (in Spanish, for example, it evolved to the name "alfil"); alfil is actually Arabic for "the elephant", where al means "the" and fil means "elephant". The Spanish word would most certainly have been taken from the Islamic provinces of Spain. The English name "bishop" is inspired by the conventional shape of the piece originally intended as the tusk of an elephant but which also looks like the mitre of a bishop.
  
  Queen: Persian farzin ("vizier") became Arabic firzan, which entered western European languages in such forms as alfferza and fers, but was later replaced by "queen". "Fers" persists as a commonly-used alternate name for the piece in Russia.