By Bundesarchiv, Bild
(wikimedia.org)
The roots of Chess date back to a game developed in the 2nd century CE by the Chinese called xiangqi, which can be (but is not always) translated as ‘Elephant Game’. This is still popular in China. Interestingly, its board contains a river in the middle and a palace on either side.
From the far east, this chess-like game probably spread to India in the 6th century via the Silk Road. The Indian game of chaturanga was then brought to Persia and, as we all know, the Persian word for ‘King’ is Shah. The Polish word for chess is szachy. In German it is schach.
Chess arrived in Europe following the Arab-Berber conquest of the Iberian peninsula in the 8th century. The most famous individual chess pieces – in terms of archaeological finds – are those discovered on the Isle of Lewis in the first half of the 19th century and today held in the British Museum. These are believed to have been made in Norway in the 12th century.
The game’s great innovation, the powerful Queen (able to move like both a bishop and a rook), was introduced in Renaissance Europe in the 15th century. Arquilla notes that this happened at the same time that the Europeans were innovating “the long-range sailing vessel armed with heavy guns”.
The earliest-recorded reference to modern chess theory dates to 1490. Written in Latin, possibly of Spanish origins, it contains some of the most effective opening lines that are still played at the top level today: for example, the Petrov (1. e4 e5, 2. Nf3 Nf6), the Ruy Lopez (1. e4 e5, 2. Nf3 Nc6, 3. Bb5) and the Queen’s Gambit (1. d4 d5, 2. c4).
The first “official” world championship was held in 1886 in the USA (with matches played in New York City, St. Louis and New Orleans). Wilhelm Steinitz (born in Prague but representing Austria-Hungary, having moved to Vienna as a student) defeated Johannes Zukertort (born in Lublin but representing the United Kingdom, having studied in Wrocław).
Steinitz was succeeded as champion in 1894 by the German mathematician Emanuel Lasker, who was born in Myślibórz (Zachodnopomorskie) and had studied in Berlin. Lasker – still regarded as one of the game’s greats – was famous for making deliberately inferior moves in order to confuse his opponents. He remained world champion until 1921.
The leading chess theorist of the pre-WWI era was Siegbert Tarrasch (from Wrocław). Which is to say that many of the game’s great players hailed from modern-day Poland and Czech Republic, i.e. from the German-speaking urban intelligentsia of imperial East-Central Europe.
Some of the most exciting developments in chess opening theory came after the First World War with the ‘hypermodern’ school. Previously, opening strategy had been focused on fighting for direct control of the centre of the board with the pawns. The new theorists argued that it was equally effective to take indirect control of the centre, with pieces attacking from distance.
Again, many of the great chess theorists of the new era hailed from Central and Eastern Europe: Richard Réti (1889-1929), born on the outskirts of Bratislava; Aron Nimzowitsch (1886-1935), born in Riga; Ksawery Tartakower (1887-1956), born in Rostov-on-Don; Miguel Najdorf (1910-1997), born in Grodzisk Mazowieckie.
11 Chess Olympiads were held in the interwar period in which each participating country was represented by a four-man team. Amongst those who took part, the most successful countries were as follows:
| GOLD | SILVER | BRONZE | |
| 1. HUNGARY | 4 | 3 | – |
| 2. UNITED STATES | 4 | 1 | – |
| 3. POLAND | 1 | 3 | 3 |
| 4. CZECHOSLOVAKIA | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 5. GERMANY | 1 | – | 1 |
| 6. SWEDEN | – | 1 | 1 |
| 7= YUGOSLAVIA | – | 1 | – |
| 7= DENMARK | – | 1 | – |
| 9= ENGLAND | – | – | 1 |
| 9= ROMANIA | – | – | 1 |
| 9= SWITZERLAND | – | – | 1 |
| 9= ESTONIA | – | – | 1 |
The Soviet Union didn’t make their tournament debut until 1952 and from then on they won 21 out of 22 Olympiads. Perhaps they would have demonstrated similar dominance of the game in the interwar period if they’d been taking part. But global chess success came to be a source of great pride in the intellectual and sporting achievements of the USSR.
The winning margins were often huge as well: one and a half in 1952, seven points in 1954, four and a half in 1956, five and a half in 1958, five points in 1960, three and a half in 1962, three and a half in 1964, five points in 1966, eight and a half points in 1968, one point in 1970, one and a half points in 1972.
The captain of the team plays on board one (“first board”) against the strongest players from the other countries. The captaincy of the USSR team passed over these years from Paul Keres (an Estonian) to Mikhail Botvinnik (born in Finland) to Mikhail Tal (a Latvian) to Tigran Petrosian (an Armenian) before being held by the likes of Boris Spassky and Anatoly Karpov.
It was Mikhail Tal who came up with one of the great descriptions of chess as a game in which you have to “take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2 + 2 = 5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.”
Bobby Fischer captained the USA team in 1960 at the age of 17 when they finished second place. In Reykjavik in 1972, Fischer became the first non-USSR player to successfully challenge for the world championship since 1948 (although it wouldn’t be until India’s Vishy Anand in 2000 that the title would once again be held by a non-Russian).
By Model Citizen (wikimedia.org)
In the mid-1980s, we begin to see the rise of the chess-playing computer, developed by research universities in the USA. This is a story best told in quotes. In 1976 it was said that the only way a computer could beat a top human player would be for the human “perhaps in a drunken stupor whilst playing 50 games simultaneously” to make a once-in-a-year blunder.
In 1982, it was said that computers play “terrible” chess, “clumsy, inefficient, diffuse, and just plain ugly”. It was only in 2017 that AlphaZero, developed by Google-owned DeepMind (perhaps more famous for also having developed AlphaGo), really began to excite the chess world with its innovative attacking play.
Russia’s dominance in the human-vs-human game extended long into the post-communist period, with its team winning all six of the Olympiads held between 1992 and 2002. The following Olympiads were then won by Ukraine in 2004, Armenia in 2006 and 2008, Ukraine in 2010, Armenia in 2012. The captain of the Armenian team in each of these years, Levon Aronian, is regarded in that country as both a national hero and a celebrity (whose status is often compared with that of David Beckham in England). To understand this troubled part of the world, around the basins of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea (the nations of the EU’s Eastern Partnership), it’s important to understand the enduring appeal of the elephant game.
The USA won the Chess Olympiad in 2016 with a diverse team led by players from Italian, Japanese and Filipino immigrant-backgrounds. Chess remains very much an immigrant game in the States and has benefitted from an in-flow of strong players and teachers from the former USSR (and privately-funded endowments). Russia remains a force in the chess world. India is home to some of the game’s top young players, including 14-year-old Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa and 15-year-old Nihal Sarin (also celebrities). Look out for Iran’s Alireza Firouzja, who at the age of 16 is already widely touted as a future world champion, and Poland’s Jan-Krzysztof Duda, who at the age of 21 is the highest-ranked player for his age.
And of course, we are also witnessing the rise of China (winners of the Olympiad in 2014 and 2018), for whom such success is always geopolitical (as Arquilla noted it would be back in 2013) but also perhaps inevitable, considering its status as the birthplace of the game.
A recent high-profile (and ultimately postponed) tournament – the 2020 Candidates – was notable for elbow bumps instead of the traditional handshakes that start and end the game at every level, from amateur up to professional. The 2020 Olympiad has been put back one year because of the Covid-19 pandemic meaning this will be the first time that the tournament hasn’t been held in an even-numbered year since 1948. We live in interesting times! You might even say that two plus two equals five.
Autor
Thomas Riley
Thomas Riley runs the Flows and Frictions podcast for Strategy&Future. Originally from Manchester, England, he has been living and teaching English in Katowice since 2009.
Strategy&Future
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