WikiBooks: Chess

by Wikimedia Foundation

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. Each player begins the game with sixteen one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent's king, whereby the king is under immediate attack (in "check") and there is no way to remove or defend it from attack on the next move. The game's present form emerged in Europe during the second half of the 15th century, an evolution of an older Indian game, Shatranj. Theoreticians have developed extensive chess strategies and tactics since the game's inception. Computers have been used for many years to create chess-playing programs, and their abilities and insights have contributed significantly to modern chess theory. One, Deep Blue, was the first machine to beat a reigning World Chess Champion when it defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Organized competitive chess began during the 16th century. The first official World Chess Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, claimed his title in 1886; the current World Champion is Viswanathan Anand from India. In addition to the World Championship, there is the Women's World Championship, the Junior World Championship, the World Senior Championship, the Correspondence Chess World Championship, the World Computer Chess Championship, and Blitz and Rapid World Championships (see fast chess). The Chess Olympiad is a popular competition among teams from different nations. Online chess has opened amateur and professional competition to a wide and varied group of players. Chess is a recognized sport of the International Olympic Committee, and international chess competition is sanctioned by the FIDE. Chess is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments. Some other popular forms of chess are fast chess and computer chess. There are many chess variants that have different rules, different pieces, and different boards. These variants include blindfold chess and Fischer Random Chess/Chess960.

Nook

First published January 3, 2011

About the author

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States. It is organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based. It operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, Wikimedia Incubator, Meta-Wiki and owns the now-defunct Nupedia. Its flagship project, Wikipedia, ranks in the top-ten most-visited websites worldwide. The creation of the foundation was officially announced on June 20, 2003, by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who had been operating Wikipedia under the aegis of his company Bomis.

The Wikimedia Foundation falls under section 501(c) of the US Internal Revenue Code as a public charity. Its National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) code is C60 (Adult, Continuing Education). The foundation's by-laws declare a statement of purpose of collecting and developing educational content and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
The Wikimedia Foundation's stated goal is to develop and maintain open content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. This is possible thanks to its Terms of Use (updated and approved on June 2009, to adopt CC-BY-SA license).

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Reviews

[Odyssefs · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good book for learning the fundamentals of chess and an elementary introduction to strategy and openings.