Portal:Chess

Welcome to the Chess Portal

Introduction

Left to right: white king, black rook, black queen, white pawn, black knight, white bishop

Chess is a board game for two players, played on a square board consisting of 64 squares arranged in an 8×8 grid. The players, referred to as "White" and "Black", each control sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns, with each piece type having a different pattern of movement. An enemy piece may be captured (removed from the board) by moving one's own piece onto the square it occupies. The object of the game is to "checkmate" (threaten with inescapable capture) the enemy king. There are also several ways a game can end in a draw.

The recorded history of chess dates back to the emergence of chaturanga in 7th-century India. Chaturanga is also thought to be an ancestor of similar games like janggi, xiangqi, and shogi. After its introduction to Persia, it spread to the Arab world and then to Europe. The modern rules of chess emerged in Europe at the end of the 15th century, becoming standardized and gaining universal acceptance by the end of the 19th century. Today, chess is one of the world's most popular games, with millions of players worldwide.

Organized chess arose in the 19th century. International chess competitions today are governed by the International Chess Federation FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Échecs). The first universally recognized World Chess Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, claimed his title in 1886; Gukesh Dommaraju is the current World Champion, having won the title in 2024. (Full article...)

Selected article - show another

8x8 Rook's graph

In graph theory, a rook's graph is an undirected graph that represents all legal moves of the rook chess piece on a chessboard. Each vertex of a rook's graph represents a square on a chessboard, and there is an edge between any two squares sharing a row (rank) or column (file), the squares that a rook can move between. These graphs can be constructed for chessboards of any rectangular shape. Although rook's graphs have only minor significance in chess lore, they are more important in the abstract mathematics of graphs through their alternative constructions: rook's graphs are the Cartesian product of two complete graphs, and are the line graphs of complete bipartite graphs. The square rook's graphs constitute the two-dimensional Hamming graphs.

Rook's graphs are highly symmetric, having symmetries taking every vertex to every other vertex. In rook's graphs defined from square chessboards, more strongly, every two edges are symmetric, and every pair of vertices is symmetric to every other pair at the same distance in moves (making the graph distance-transitive). For rectangular chessboards whose width and height are relatively prime, the rook's graphs are circulant graphs. With one exception, the rook's graphs can be distinguished from all other graphs using only two properties: the numbers of triangles each edge belongs to, and the existence of a unique $4$ -cycle connecting each nonadjacent pair of vertices. (Full article...)

List of selected articles

General images

The following are images from various chess-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Two Georgian writers, Ilia Chavchavadze and Ivane Machabeli, playing chess in Saint Petersburg, 1873 (from Chess in the arts)
Image 2The 12th-century Lewis chessmen in the collection of the National Museum of Scotland (from History of chess)
Image 3Sofonisba Anguissola, The Chess Game, 1555, National Museum, Poznań, Poland (from Chess in the arts)
Image 4Stamp of the USSR devoted to the accomplished Estonian player and analyst Paul Keres, 1991 (from History of chess)
Image 5Liberale da Verona, The Chess Players, c. 1475 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) (from Chess in the arts)
Image 6John Lavery, 1929, The Chess Players (from Chess in the arts)
Image 7Richard Creifelds, c. 1886, The Veterans, Brooklyn Museum (from Chess in the arts)
Image 8A Chess Dispute (1903) (from Chess in the arts)
Image 9Antonis Mor, 1549, Von Sachsen vs. a Spaniard (from Chess in the arts)
Image 10Final match of the 1575 tournament in El Escorial. Painting by Luigi Mussini. (from History of chess)
Image 11Edward Harrison May, 1867, Lady Howe mating Benjamin Franklin (from Chess in the arts)
Image 12Book of the customs of men and the duties of nobles or the Book of Chess (1473) (from Chess in the arts)
Image 13Hans Muelich, 1552, Duke Albrecht V. of Bavaria and his wife Anna of Austria playing chess (from Chess in the arts)
Image 14Iranian shatranj set, glazed fritware, 12th century, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (from History of chess)
Image 15RZA at a Hip Hop Chess Federation Tournament (from Chess in the arts)
Image 16Bauhaus chess set by Josef Hartwig (from Chess in the arts)
Image 17Animation of the Immortal Game, in which Adolf Anderssen, playing White, beat Lionel Kieseritzky in June 1851 (from History of chess)
Image 18Honoré Daumier, 1863, The Chess Players (from Chess in the arts)
Image 19Cocowood chess set (Philippines craft) (from Chess in the arts)
Image 20Moors from Andalusia playing chess, Book of Games by King Alfonso X, 1283 (from Chess in the arts)
Image 21Persian manuscript from the 14th century describing how an ambassador from India brought chess to the Persian court (from History of chess)
Image 22Lucas van Leyden, c. 1508, The Game of Chess, oil on oak, 27 x 35 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (from Chess in the arts)
Image 23Karel van Mander, 1600 (attributed to), Les joueurs d'échecs (from Chess in the arts)
Image 24Bobby Fischer vs. Mikhail Tal (from History of chess)
Image 25Paris Bordone, c. 1545, Chess players, oil on canvas, Mailand, Wohnhaus (from Chess in the arts)
Image 26Krishna and Radha playing chaturanga on an 8×8 ashtāpada (from History of chess)
Image 27Moors from Andalusia playing chess, Book of Games by King Alfonso X, 1283 (from History of chess)
Image 28Chess Set by Man Ray (from Chess in the arts)
Image 29In 1975, former President of Pakistan Zulfi Bhutto gifted a carved ivory set of chess to the former United States President Gerald Ford. (from Chess in the arts)
Image 30Thomas Eakins, 1876, The Chess Players (from Chess in the arts)
Image 31World Champions José Raúl Capablanca (left) and Emanuel Lasker in 1925 (from History of chess)
Image 32An illustration from a Persian manuscript "A treatise on chess". The Ambassadors from India present the Chatrang to Khosrow I Anushirwan, "Immortal Soul", King of Persia. (from History of chess)
Image 33Iranian courtiers of the Qajar dynasty playing chess in Mazandaran (from History of chess)
Image 34These seven ivory chess pieces are the oldest known, dating to about 700 CE. The ivory came from India. They were excavated in 1977 by archaeologist Yuriy Buryakov, at Afrasiyab in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. They are housed today at the Samarkand State Museum. Photographed during a loan of the pieces to the Silk Roads Exhibition at the British Museum. (from History of chess)
Image 35The Chess Players by Henry Fox Talbot, 1847 (from History of chess)
Image 36Chess game between Tha'ālibī and Bākhazarī, 1896 painting by Ludwig Deutsch (from History of chess)
Image 37Shams-i Tabrīzī as portrayed in a 1500 painting in a page of a copy of Rumi's poem dedicated to Shams (from History of chess)
Image 38Gustaf Lundberg, 1775, Portrait of Gustav Badin, pastel, 74 x 57 cm, Nationalmuseum, Sweden (from Chess in the arts)
Image 39Niccolò di Pietro, 1413–15, The Conversion of Saint Augustin, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon (from Chess in the arts)
Image 40Some of the earliest examples of chess-related art are medieval illustrations accompanying books or manuscripts, such as this chess problem from the 1283 Libro de los juegos. (from Chess in the arts)
Image 41Current world champion Gukesh Dommaraju (from History of chess)
Image 42Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official World Chess Champion (from History of chess)

Selected image

Image 1Click to enlarge and view description
Image 2Click to enlarge and view description
Image 3Click to enlarge and view description

FIDE world ranking

Rank	Player	Rating
1	Magnus Carlsen	2840
2	Hikaru Nakamura	2810
3	Fabiano Caruana	2795
4	Vincent Keymer	2776
5	Arjun Erigaisi	2775
6	Anish Giri	2760
7	Alireza Firouzja	2759
8	R Praggnanandhaa	2758
9	Gukesh Dommaraju	2754
10	Wei Yi	2754
11	Wesley So	2753
12	Nodirbek Abdusattorov	2751
13	Viswanathan Anand	2743
14	Richárd Rapport	2741
15	Leinier Domínguez	2738
16	Maxime Vachier-Lagrave	2734
17	Jan-Krzysztof Duda	2731
18	Lê Quang Liêm	2731
19	Shakhriyar Mamedyarov	2730
20	Levon Aronian	2729

Did you know...

... that there have been attempts to make chess an Olympic sport since at least 1924?

Reviewed articles

Featured articles	Good articles
First-move advantage in chess	42nd Chess Olympiad	Goryachkina, Aleksandra
Gossip, George H. D.	43rd Chess Olympiad	Guramishvili, Sopiko
List of female chess grandmasters	Abdumalik, Zhansaya	Kazarian, Anna-Maja
Mechanical Turk	Alekhine, Alexander	Kristjánsson, Stefán
44th Chess Olympiad	Anderssen, Adolf	Lasker, Emanuel
	Belenkaya, Dina	Mammadzada, Gunay
	Bindrich, Falko	Milner-Barry, Stuart
	Blübaum, Matthias	Modern Benoni
	Budapest Gambit	Muzychuk, Anna
	Bughouse chess	Nadanian, Ashot
	Carlsen, Magnus	Rudolf, Anna
	Chess in Armenia	Rules of chess
	Cramling, Anna	Staunton, Howard
	Deep Blue (Chess computer)	Steinitz, Wilhelm
	En passant	Turochamp
	Endgame tablebase	World Chess Championship 1972
	Fischer, Bobby	Zhou, Qiyu