Chess did not exist until the 18th century when Andre Philidor discovered pawns. He used these to pawnish his opponents. Earlier, the Bishop Ruy Lopez advocated placing the board so that the sun shines in your opponent's eyes. However, it was not clear whether he was referring to chess or the Spanish Inquisition.
When the full game finally developed, Howard Staunton decided there should be a World Champion, for which he gracefully volunteered. It is not sure whether Staunton ever really played chess, but it can be said he made certain designs in that set direction.
Along came the American Paul Morphy, who developed the principle of moving a second piece before the first one was captured. Morphy went to Europe so to conquer the giants of the game, just to find out at 5'5" he was the only one. He then challenged Staunton to a match, whereupon the latter decided that he was an eminent Shakespearean scholar. Paul then accused the Russians of fixing world chess and so decided to become a lawyer so that he could bar them from playing. However, as the Civil War approached, Paul joined the Southern craze and not much was heard from American chess for 10,000 years.
Next among the giants was Adolf Anderssen, whose immortal game was promptly verified by Irving Chernev and Chess Review.
Positional chess was founded by the next World Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, who found that by retreating all his pieces to the back rank, he could still induce his opponents to try and capture them. Steinitz eventually became unstable, challenging God to odds of pawn and move. God won.
Steinitz was eventually defeated by Emmanuel Lasker, who used psychology to discover that if he made blunders his opponents would be so overjoyed that they would promptly make bigger ones. However, he could only keep this up for 27 years, and by then his opponents began to get wise.
Three early non-World Champions should be mentioned: Dr. Siegbert Tarrasch, who assimilated the theories of Morphy, Steinitz, and Lasker into one big theory that enabled him to lose his World Championship match, Aron Nimzovitch, whose brilliant, eccentric, and original ideas placed him among the average grandmasters of his day, and Richard Reti, who found the theory of letting your opponent mess up his center first very useful.
By then the new World Champion was the immortal, invincible, Jose Capablanca, who was crushed in his first title defense against a new challenger, Alexander Alekhine, aka Alex the Keen. Alex's games were so keen that everyone got lost in the complications, which he managed to slightly unravel (with a few tall tales added) ten years later in his immortal books Modesty and Me: Alex Keen's Best Hindsight in Analysis 1907-1923 and How to Have Fun at Tournaments and Still Keep Your Composure 1924-1939. During World War II Alex had to survive the Nazis. He did, only to die immediately thereafter.
After Alex was gone, the International Chess Organization, F.I.D.O., set up a tournament with the objective of finding the best match player.
Soviet Mikhail Botvinnik won, but then proved the F.I.D.O. system of finding a match champion through a tournament faulty. He did this by defending his title against four different opponents, and did not achieve a winning record in any of these four attempts. Keres (who did not play a match but was in the way nevertheless) and Bronstein were politely asked to support the Soviet cause and Smyslov and Tal had to play until they lost rematches.
Ultimately Botvinnik was defeated by Tigran Petrosian, who adopted the philosophy of never losing - or winning, and thus was unable to win any tournaments.
The unmovable force Petrosian was displaced by Boris Spassky, who then represented the East in the famous Spassky-Fischer match. His opponent, the mercurial American Bobby Fischer, represented the West and won the title, but now Spassky lives in the West and Fischer is not allowed there any more and does not want to be called American. Mercurial is also under investigation.
Fischer proclaimed that he would be "The Playing World Champion", so he never played again. Thereupon Anatoly Karpov became World Champion. Karpov professed to want to play Fischer, but somehow never got around to actually doing it.
Meanwhile young Garry Kasparov changed his last name from Weinstein so that he could play less religiously. Kasparov thereafter won the right to play for the title, but was losing the match to Karpov 5-3 when the match was stopped by F.I.D.O. Kasparov said he was winning because Karpov was only ahead 5-3. Karpov, from his hospital bed, protested that he felt fine and wanted to continue, but they were not letting him. Finally, in the rematch, Kasparov won, which caused not only the Soviet Union to break up, but also Kasparov from F.I.D.O.
In between, Kasparov lost a controversial match against IBM's computer Deep Blue, which meant Deep Blue was not only not World Champion, but promptly dismantled forever.
F.I.D.O. decided to institute knockout matches for the World Championship, but all that did was create bantom weight (Khalifman), lightweight (Ponomariev), middleweight (Kasimdzhanov), cruiserweight (Anand), and welterweight (Kramnik) World Champions, while Fischer, Karpov, and Kasparov all confidently say that they indeed should all be recognized as the rightful champion. Then Shirov, who defeated Kramnik so that Kramnik could challenge Kasparov (don't ask), sued F.I.D.O. and Kasparov for the right to play a World Championship match, even though Kasparov does not play in F.I.D.O. any more, and is not the non-F.I.D.O. World Champion. Finally, Peter Leko lost the final game of his semi-final match against Kramnik to fall into an unfortunate tie, whereas the other semi-final never got played (got that)?
So finally F.I.D.O. decided to unify the World Championship with a tournament in Argentina. Naturally then, Kasparov retired to fight the Russian politicians, and a player not mentioned before, Vaselin Topalov, won easily. One of the participants, GM Jimmy Adams, had just come from losing a match to Hydra, another computer, 5.5-0.5. Due to the close nature of this match Topalov had signed to play Hydra and see if the humans are improving but instead accepted a challenge from...Kramnik!
In the Grand Reunification Match, Topalov was the big fan favorite, but because Kramnik had to go to the bathroom so often, by the end of the match everyone was rooting for the Big K! By winning this match, the possibly two-time champion Kramnik was now allowed to play in a tournament (?) for the next World Championship, while Topalov was not allowed to play at all. See if you can figure that one out!
Eventually Anand won the World Championship for the 5th (?) time but then lost to a great young player, Magnus Carlsen from the obvious chess-power country of Norway. Carlsen was young enough to outsit almost any opponent. Indeed, it took the great US player Hikaru Nakamura about 20+ "slow" games vs Carlsen before Naka finally got his first win (not that I would ever get one...).
Meanwhile on the computer chess side, Komodo and Stockfish were dominating the field, although Houdini apparently is making a comeback...
Then it became now, and all history stopped.
When the full game finally developed, Howard Staunton decided there should be a World Champion, for which he gracefully volunteered. It is not sure whether Staunton ever really played chess, but it can be said he made certain designs in that set direction.
Along came the American Paul Morphy, who developed the principle of moving a second piece before the first one was captured. Morphy went to Europe so to conquer the giants of the game, just to find out at 5'5" he was the only one. He then challenged Staunton to a match, whereupon the latter decided that he was an eminent Shakespearean scholar. Paul then accused the Russians of fixing world chess and so decided to become a lawyer so that he could bar them from playing. However, as the Civil War approached, Paul joined the Southern craze and not much was heard from American chess for 10,000 years.
Next among the giants was Adolf Anderssen, whose immortal game was promptly verified by Irving Chernev and Chess Review.
Positional chess was founded by the next World Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, who found that by retreating all his pieces to the back rank, he could still induce his opponents to try and capture them. Steinitz eventually became unstable, challenging God to odds of pawn and move. God won.
Steinitz was eventually defeated by Emmanuel Lasker, who used psychology to discover that if he made blunders his opponents would be so overjoyed that they would promptly make bigger ones. However, he could only keep this up for 27 years, and by then his opponents began to get wise.
Three early non-World Champions should be mentioned: Dr. Siegbert Tarrasch, who assimilated the theories of Morphy, Steinitz, and Lasker into one big theory that enabled him to lose his World Championship match, Aron Nimzovitch, whose brilliant, eccentric, and original ideas placed him among the average grandmasters of his day, and Richard Reti, who found the theory of letting your opponent mess up his center first very useful.
By then the new World Champion was the immortal, invincible, Jose Capablanca, who was crushed in his first title defense against a new challenger, Alexander Alekhine, aka Alex the Keen. Alex's games were so keen that everyone got lost in the complications, which he managed to slightly unravel (with a few tall tales added) ten years later in his immortal books Modesty and Me: Alex Keen's Best Hindsight in Analysis 1907-1923 and How to Have Fun at Tournaments and Still Keep Your Composure 1924-1939. During World War II Alex had to survive the Nazis. He did, only to die immediately thereafter.
After Alex was gone, the International Chess Organization, F.I.D.O., set up a tournament with the objective of finding the best match player.
Soviet Mikhail Botvinnik won, but then proved the F.I.D.O. system of finding a match champion through a tournament faulty. He did this by defending his title against four different opponents, and did not achieve a winning record in any of these four attempts. Keres (who did not play a match but was in the way nevertheless) and Bronstein were politely asked to support the Soviet cause and Smyslov and Tal had to play until they lost rematches.
Ultimately Botvinnik was defeated by Tigran Petrosian, who adopted the philosophy of never losing - or winning, and thus was unable to win any tournaments.
The unmovable force Petrosian was displaced by Boris Spassky, who then represented the East in the famous Spassky-Fischer match. His opponent, the mercurial American Bobby Fischer, represented the West and won the title, but now Spassky lives in the West and Fischer is not allowed there any more and does not want to be called American. Mercurial is also under investigation.
Fischer proclaimed that he would be "The Playing World Champion", so he never played again. Thereupon Anatoly Karpov became World Champion. Karpov professed to want to play Fischer, but somehow never got around to actually doing it.
Meanwhile young Garry Kasparov changed his last name from Weinstein so that he could play less religiously. Kasparov thereafter won the right to play for the title, but was losing the match to Karpov 5-3 when the match was stopped by F.I.D.O. Kasparov said he was winning because Karpov was only ahead 5-3. Karpov, from his hospital bed, protested that he felt fine and wanted to continue, but they were not letting him. Finally, in the rematch, Kasparov won, which caused not only the Soviet Union to break up, but also Kasparov from F.I.D.O.
In between, Kasparov lost a controversial match against IBM's computer Deep Blue, which meant Deep Blue was not only not World Champion, but promptly dismantled forever.
F.I.D.O. decided to institute knockout matches for the World Championship, but all that did was create bantom weight (Khalifman), lightweight (Ponomariev), middleweight (Kasimdzhanov), cruiserweight (Anand), and welterweight (Kramnik) World Champions, while Fischer, Karpov, and Kasparov all confidently say that they indeed should all be recognized as the rightful champion. Then Shirov, who defeated Kramnik so that Kramnik could challenge Kasparov (don't ask), sued F.I.D.O. and Kasparov for the right to play a World Championship match, even though Kasparov does not play in F.I.D.O. any more, and is not the non-F.I.D.O. World Champion. Finally, Peter Leko lost the final game of his semi-final match against Kramnik to fall into an unfortunate tie, whereas the other semi-final never got played (got that)?
So finally F.I.D.O. decided to unify the World Championship with a tournament in Argentina. Naturally then, Kasparov retired to fight the Russian politicians, and a player not mentioned before, Vaselin Topalov, won easily. One of the participants, GM Jimmy Adams, had just come from losing a match to Hydra, another computer, 5.5-0.5. Due to the close nature of this match Topalov had signed to play Hydra and see if the humans are improving but instead accepted a challenge from...Kramnik!
In the Grand Reunification Match, Topalov was the big fan favorite, but because Kramnik had to go to the bathroom so often, by the end of the match everyone was rooting for the Big K! By winning this match, the possibly two-time champion Kramnik was now allowed to play in a tournament (?) for the next World Championship, while Topalov was not allowed to play at all. See if you can figure that one out!
Eventually Anand won the World Championship for the 5th (?) time but then lost to a great young player, Magnus Carlsen from the obvious chess-power country of Norway. Carlsen was young enough to outsit almost any opponent. Indeed, it took the great US player Hikaru Nakamura about 20+ "slow" games vs Carlsen before Naka finally got his first win (not that I would ever get one...).
Meanwhile on the computer chess side, Komodo and Stockfish were dominating the field, although Houdini apparently is making a comeback...
Then it became now, and all history stopped.