Game of Chess

The game of chess has had a long and distinguished history in cultures throughout the world. There are many facets to the ways in which chess has affected the cultures of various nations and cultures and their ways of relating to each other, but one aspect of this story that students and practitioners of the game may find of particular interest in seeing how the game reached its modern day form is the very early history of the first forms taken by chess. This epic narrative has seen the game move from what are believed to be its earliest origins in a specific region of India to Europe during the Middle Ages, over the course of which period the game has been picked up by various cultures for various means and has been slowly but surely toward the rules under which chess is currently played.

Though historians of the game differ on the extent to which it can be reliably ascribed to a particular time and place, but the most common milieu given for chess’s beginning is in 6th century Northwest India, in the region under the control of the Gupta empire. The game was first named, in a very basic form, in the Sanskrit language, a close relative of the languages of Western nations where it would one day achieve preeminence among board games. This name, “caturanga,” is translated as “four units,” referring to divisions of an army. The four titular divisions in this early form of chess consisted of pieces representing the infantry, the cavalry, the elephants, and the chariots. These figures in the game find their modern day equivalents, respectively, in the pawn, knight, bishop and rook.

The popularity of chess began with this very early form of the game, which already manifests the tendency to be transmitted to other, nearby cultures and assume a place in their social structures. The earliest physical evidence of chess being played by a people derives from the first such point of departure for the game of “caturanga,” to the neighboring area of Sassanid Persia, This move occurred around the year 600 and found the game being given the name “chatrang.” More reliable documentation exists for this kind of chess than for its possibly earliest form in India. Scholars have located three romantic epic poems written in the language designated as Medium Persian, Pahlavi, in which the game of “chatrang” plays a pivotal part in the heroes’ lives. In another step toward the dissemination of chess as a commonly played game throughout the cultures of the world, Muslim warriors conquered Persia in the seventh century and in the process found the game in an intermediate stage in which it was known as “shatranj.” From this point on the game was spread to European cultures, probably by way of ports where commercial and trade activity thrived. This process had already occurred in the ninth century, and by the year 1000 it was being played widely throughout Europe, beginning the long reign of chess.

Free Chess

People who enjoy playing and sharpening their skills at chess have a wide array of methods online for continuing their engagement with the game, in the process getting in touch with new competitors and fellow students of the game to learn from. In particular, a boon exists for chess enthusiasts who are also web- and tech-savvy in the form of the proliferation of free chess applications provided through online services. Such sites offer to online chess players the inducement of playing free chess through easy-to-use web interfaces and also making contact through the practice of social media with a wider world of chess players.

Players interested in the concept of free chess should be aware that there are many online chess services which enjoy high levels of popularity but also requires the payment of fees. Though the decision to acquire such services may be easily made by some individuals who enjoy a high degree of financial security and consequently access to ample discretionary funds, for many players who are trying to put their love of the game into practice without imperilling themselves financially, the free chess websites may prove to be the best route for extending their enthusiasm into the online world.

That being said, the option of free chess online services should not be the only one considered by players who otherwise possess the financial means for paying for the subscriptions to such sites. One of the first online chess clubs is called, appropriately, Chessclub.com, which dates back to 1992, and has since built a solid base of support from its many and loyal users. The quality of players found on such sites in terms of commitment to the game and level of skill may be found to be greater than the level of players who frequent free chess websites, so the opportunities offered by sites like Chessclub.com should not be discounted. Another highly recommended choice often made by online chess aficionados exists in the form of Chessbase, a German run software company that at a fee provides access to a network of online players who can go up in number to over 1,000 people logged at any normal time of traffic for the site.

A prominent provider of free chess services for users who are unwilling or unable to make the financial investment in a subscription site like Chessclub or Chessbase exists in the shape of The Free Internet Chess Server, accessible at freechess.com, which has an announced membership of over 300,000 players. In appealing to less dedicated, more casual chess players, the free chess sites may also offer more introductory services for the starting chess player. At Chess.com, another free chess website, basic instruction on how to play the game can be found for visitors, who will also be able access a wide range of chess players without paying a fee at numbers which can exceed more than 3,000 on some evenings. Online chess players should go by their level of expertise and financial resources.

Chess Game Strategy

One of the leading chess game players in the United States, as identified by media sources and experts on the chess game field, is fourteen years old. Daniel Naroditsky is a student in the eighth grade whose reputation for being able to play a great chess game is such that he has already published a manual about his strategy and mindset as a player. He is renowned among players, beginning with those in his own family who taught him chess and played with him when he was a young child, for the virtues of subtlety and patience manifested by his playing, which are qualities well known as the ideal tools for winning a chess game but less recognized as the virtues to be found in a teenage boy. Daniel is said by those who have played against him and studied with him to present a model for the young chess game student to emulate in developing his or her abilities in the game and overall approach to besting opponents.

Daniel’s precocity as a player has drawn plentiful attention from the general and chess oriented media. He was first taught chess game rules by his father, Vladimir, a college math professor, when Daniel was six years old. After a steady chess game regimen of father-son matches that lasted for three years, Vladimir discovered that his son’s skills were so far in advance of his own that he was starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable in how easily he was being eaten by a nine-year old. At that point, Vladimir Naroditsky says today, he stopped playing with his son, at first simply to assuage his wounded pride, and then so the family, including mother Lena, a concert pianist, could focus on sending Daniel out into the wider world of chess game playing. By the age of eleven years old, Daniel had attained the point in his mastery of the game that he was officially considered a chess master. By the next year, his success on the chess game field had raised him to the level of a junior world champion. Though his achievements are clearly the result of some innate and already manifested gifts, in telling his story Daniel has emphasized that his remarkable chess game record is also due to the great amount of time he has given over to studying past chess masters and games and acquiring a firm literacy in the body of knowledge that has grown up around the game.

Building upon the achievements and experience he has already built up in playing chess, Daniel published a textbook on chess game strategy, “Mastering Positional Chess,” which seeks to impart the means through which he has steadily climbed the rungs of the chess world. The two strategies he has emphasized for use in playing a great chess game are those of subtlety and aggression. In the text of the book and in the lectures he has given to chess clubs, Daniel has pointed out that a chess player needs to know exactly what she or he hopes to accomplish.

Chess Games

Though in some respects chess games might seem to have an uneasy place in the modern, digitally-powered world of leisure activities, the game appears to be retaining its popularity in the Internet era. While users enjoying playing chess games over the Internet and thereby getting in touch with new friends who share their interests and new plays to gain expertise from, educational authorities and activist figures have been promoting the game of chess throughout the United States as a tool for sharpening students’ minds in regards to issues like problem solving and strategizing. Schools that have sponsored special programs urging students toward the playing of chess games in the face of environments felt to engender low levels of self respect in young people and lead to potential difficulties with the law and issues of substance abuse have also reported encouraging rates of success in using these programs to spread self-esteem in their student bodies and creating excitement for the activity of playing chess.

One source for the continuing support for using chess games to make a positive impact in the lives of the young has come from legislative bodies. In the early months of 2010, it was reported through media outlets that the Rhode Island Senate had passed a resolution aimed towards just this result of enabling the tactic of promoting the playing of chess games as an extracurricular and in school activity aimed at helping students. The legislative measure was not prescriptive and thus will not have any immediate effect on the official policy of Rhode Island schools in regards to the use of chess games as a teaching tool, but it is felt to signal that the environment of support and enthusiasm for such a program is present to enough of a degree to possibly make such a program a reality. The wording of the resolution approved by the legislature announces that the Rhode Island Senate is committed to a recommendation “encouraging the state education commissioner to support chess instruction either in classrooms or clubs in Rhode Island’s public schools.” Despite the merely advisory nature of this move toward the promotion of chess games as a tool for school systems, which may or may not be adopted by officials depending on their final judgment and secondary issues such as the availability of school funds at a time of financial distress for many school districts, its strong wording has cheered commentators who believe in the positive potential of such a move for the lives of young people.

The well-known actor and prominent activist Edward James Olmos is also an advocate of the approach of using the promotion of chess games to improve the self esteem and quality of life for young people. He recently urged the school board for the district of Huntsville, Texas to publicize their successful implementation of just such a program for the benefit of their students. His suggestion has been to make a documentary about the program, which he says “breeds self-respect at the highest level.”

Play Chess Online

The ability to be able to play chess online is an important component of many people’s online presence. From the early period of the Internet era, when the technology had yet to become widely and cheaply available through the consumer market and was restricted to a handful of researchers, developers, and other tech-savvy figures, the possibility for the users of a connected network of computers to make use of the capability in order to play chess online has appealed to designers and theorists involved in creating software and hardware. Even before it was possible to actually play chess online, computers had been developed for the primary purpose of functioning as chess opponents against which their users could play. Later, as the Internet was developed in the early stages of becoming an essential component of leisure activities and commerce, the capacity to play chess online was introduced as a service at quite an early stage. One possible explanation for the appeal held by online chess games for early personal computer and Internet developers lies in the affinity of such kinds of people as excel in developing innovative and technically sophisticated software toward a game with the features of chess, which emphasizes strength in the performance of traits such as problem solving and preplanning as joined to an imperative for a high degree of competitiveness. People who enjoy having the ability to play chess online might take an interest in gaining an acquaintance with the early history of how this valued Internet capacity was developed for consumer use.

The proposal of the solution for the question of how to play chess online was first given before computer technology had come close to devising interfaces that would be readily and inexpensively available to consumers. Claude Shannon, an electronics engineer and mathematician, most famously distinguished himself by publishing a paper in 1948 that is widely given credit for being the founding document of information theory. Not quite as prominently, but just as notably for some enthusiasts of online chess, Shannon published a paper in 1950 entitled “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” which outlined a program for equipping a computer with the software means for playing a game of chess against a human opponent that would be roughly comparable to the game that could be played between two human opponents. Shannon’s paper found two main approaches to the task of creating computer programs that could play chess online, which he divided into “A” and “B” approaches. “Type A” would approach the problem of predicting possible chess moves using a minimax algorithim, which look at every possible position. Particularly in regards to the relatively slow computing speed of the time, Shannon found such an approach very impractical for the complex task of calculating the many interlocking parts of the problem of deciding on overall chess strategy. Shannon suggested that the wiser approach would be a “Type B,” pruning back the number of moves considered with each turn. This has been widely adopted.

Chess Online

Playing chess online is a favorite Internet activity for many computer users, one that has allowed people to bring their love for and fascination with the game into the online age. A wide variety of Internet sites allow people to play chess online, some for free and some for paid subscriptions. The chess online technology that has been presented to users also allows people access to a wide array of other chess players of varying skill levels, giving them the opportunity to find chess online opponents of equal skill level and experience with the game. Such sites have been a prominent feature of the Internet since it was first made available to consumer users. Even prototype versions of the technology that would later be provided to a wide array of users as the Internet allowed people to play chess. The capability to play chess online comes from a feature of

Internet technology that was developed known as Internet chess servers.
Internet chess servers allow people to play and perform other functions associated with chess through online connections. They function as external servers that allow connections to be formed through an array of graphics programs installed on the computers of each online player. As the demand for the ability to play chess online has grown over the years in which the Internet has been in common use, the variety of Internet chess servers that are available for use by the public have been increased, and several can now be employed by Internet users interested in chess. The largest Internet chess server belongs to the Internet Chess Club, a longstanding site for playing chess online that has been in existence since 1992, in the process attracting an extensive and loyal membership of Internet based chess players. Another notable chess server in terms of use and popularity is the function created for use on the site of Yahoo!Games, while yet another notable company that operates an important Internet chess server is the well-known Playchess.
The history of the development of this technology for playing chess online extends back to the nineteen seventies, which saw the successful development and implementation of a program created under the PLATO System rubric that went by the name of “chess3.” It was not however connected to any prototype versions of the Internet, and as a platform for delivering the capacity to play chess online was well known and used regularly only by a small number of users involved in developing the technology. With the development of Internet technology in the early nineteen nineties, developers saw the promise of technology that would allow users of the new capacity to play Internet chess online. The start-up of the Internet Chess Server occurred in 1992, with the developers soon moving the technology to servers located at Carnegie Mellon University. Three years later, one of the developers of the service decided to offer it commercially and placed access to the Internet chess server on the basis of a paid subscription.

Playing Chess

Though many people throughout the world play chess simply for the enjoyment and mental sharpening provided by the game, chess also provides for the occasion of some competitions which are accorded great significance by their various participants and in their dispensing of awards can provide the occasion for great prestige to be bestowed on certain players both in the world of chess enthusiasts and professionals and in the wider world at large. The most significant, though not only, organization for people who seriously play chess is known as the Federation Internationale des Echecs or FIDE, or sometimes for English speakers the World Chess Federation. It is an internationally based organization that provides for connections and cooperation between various nationally and locally based chess groups and allows the certification of approval to be bestowed on certain widely known competitions matching people against each other renowned for their skillful ability to play chess.

Due to the high prestige enjoyed by the FIDE, the organization is officially recognized by the International Olympic Committee. It is perhaps most respected and known for its role in organizing the World Chess Championship and the Chess Olympiad, as well as very regional championship competitions at which people play chess. There are few other chess competitions in which FIDE plays a direct organizational part, but it is responsible for setting the rules and regulations by which these competitions are governed. In a more general sense, the FIDE has the responsibility and power of defining the official according to which individual players and those based out of competitions play chess. Some of the titles that can be awarded to individuals for the excellence found in them by FIDE in their ability to competitively play chess include FIDE Master, International Master, and International Grandmaster, along with modified feminine versions of those titles. Master and Grandmaster titles can be awarded outside the realm of actual competitions at which people play chess against each other for solving notable problems and formulating ingenious methods of study, which FIDE will then periodically publish through FIDE Albums.
FIDE has its origins in Paris in 1924. This followed earlier efforts made elsewhere in Europe to form some kind of wide reaching organizations for people who liked to play chess at a professional or highly trained level, and that had been disrupted by international events such as the beginning of the First World War. FIDE was successfully formed during a chess competition held during the Eighth Sports Olympics at the behest of a famous Russian grandmaster. When the organization was first successfully formed, it functioned as a kind of players’ unions and consequently did little to attract funding and wide media attention. It thus was left poorly financed and had a relatively informal nature. FIDE began to become known to the wider community of people who play chess when it became involved in dispensing recognition to world chess champions. Later it had conflicts with an organization called the Soviet Chess Federation over relative status.