User:Gaeanautes/Chess game

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India
The game of chess originated in the magnificent Gupta Empire in India in the 6th century CE. The original name of the game was chaturanga, literally meaning 'four divisions', a standard battle formation mentioned in the Indian epic Mahabharata. The four divisions referred to elephants, chariots, horsemen and infantry. The pieces and the rules of the game were rather different than what they later evolved into: There was no queen, but a prime minister instead; there were no bishops, but elephants instead; castling was not possible, rendering the king a somewhat more vulnerable piece than chess players are familiar with today. The game of chaturanga was invented and developed in military academies as a didactic tool for teaching young cadets the principles of battlefield tactics in a simplified fashion. Later, the game spread to the upper political and administrative strata of Guptan India, becoming a favourite pastime for the elite. Even the ruling dynastic family involved itself in the sport: Much like horseback riding, fencing and dancing, it came to be regarded as suitable, even prestigious, for a young male of the Gupta lineage to master chaturanga.

Persia
From India, the game of chaturanga slowly spread to Persia. In Persia, the game acquired the name it is known by today, namely shah, meaning 'king' in Persian. After the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century, chaturanga spread to the rest of the Muslim world. Due to the Muslim ban on the depiction of animals and humans, the Indian-type game pieces were replaced by pieces having more abstract shapes. As for the materials used for the pieces, the costly ebony and ivory used in India were replaced by the much simpler clay and carved stone, greatly reducing the manufacturing costs of a chess game set. There can be little doubt that this development made the game more accessible for the lower stratas of Muslim society, both in Persia and elsewhere. Later, the game of shah translated into ajedrez in Spanish and into chess in English.

Medieval Europe
From Persia, chess spread further to the north and the west by way of Persian merchants travelling along the Silk Road that connected China and the Mediterranean through Central Asia. In Western Europe, the game was introduced into the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors in the 10th century. From then on and until the 18th century, Spain and Italy were the two leading chess nations in Europe. In these two countries, the pieces and the rules of the game were further developed and came to reflect the feudal order of contemporary European society, made up of peasants (the pawns), knights, mercenaries (the rooks), the religious rule of the Catholic Church (the bishops), and the worldly rule of monarchs (the pair of king and queen). The bishop and the queen remained fairly weak pieces until the end of the 15th century, when the queen was promoted to move in all directions on the board without limits. This was initially known as 'Mad Queen Chess', until the new rules had disseminated among chess players and was accepted as the general norm.

18th century France
In the course of the 18th century, the center of European chess life passed from Southern Europe to France. Philidor, the most legendary and awesome chess master of the time, realised the importance of pawns in game strategy. He wrote a best-selling, and now classic, manual on his strategic insights and impressed the audiences in clubs and coffee houses throughout  France and England. Chess was now becoming the subject of theoretical study by its practitioners. After the heyday of Philidor, chess strategy developed immensely (see below).

The Soviet experience
In the latter Middle Ages, chess spread throughout Russia from the Middle East when the region was ruled by the Byzantine Empire. However, Russia did not develop to become a major chess playing nation before well into the 20th century. After the Russian Revolution and the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, the new rulers of the country came to regard chess as an expedient manipulative tool for both pacifying their own subjects and for competing with the West at the ideological level. An extensive state-sponsored chess-playing programme was launched by the Soviet leadership, and the Russian population was turned into an enthusiastic, although somewhat gullible crowd of chess players. This officially designed 'chess factory' proved to be effective in producing a host of excellent chess players, including Botvinnik, Korchnoi, Tal, Spassky and Karpov. By the middle of the 20th century, the world chess scene was completely dominated by the Soviet Union. Only the brilliant, but somewhat dysfunctional American Bobby Fischer was able to challenge Soviet dominance for a while. However, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 put an end to Russian hegemony in chess, and this situation has since persisted. The present Russian president Vladim Ire Poohtin does not even know the rules of the game, well, of any game for that matter.

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Strategy: Chess strategy has developed immensely since Philidors time (see above). Chess strategy is very complicated, and volume after volume of books are stuffed with it; but for a concise encyclopedic exposition such as the present one, suffice to say that you simply have to whack the opponent's king. Everything else is merely details.

Famous chess quotes
Upon his retirement from the chess scene, Russian grand master Mikhail Botvinnik was asked by a news journalist: "After having played and studied the game of chess through all of your adult life, surely you have learned to master the game completely by now?" Botvinnik is reported to have replied: "No, one human life is much too short a period of time to fully come to understand chess!" Narh, maybe it wasn't Botvinnik who said this after all, but some other high-profiled chess champion instead; anyway, even if the quotation is a hoax altogether it is still a funny one, exposing the general geekiness of chess players around the world, he-he (chuckle).