Stage 1What Chess Is, and How to Use This Guide

Chess is a game for two players on a board of sixty-four squares. Each player commands sixteen pieces, and the object is to trap the opposing king so that it has no escape. There are no dice, no cards and nothing hidden. Everything that happens on the board was chosen by one of the two people sitting at it, which is why a lost game stings the way it does, and why a won one is so satisfying.

That is the whole of the equipment and the whole of the luck. Everything else grew out of those sixty-four squares: openings with names older than most nations, endgame positions analysed for centuries, clocks, ratings and titles, and a professional circuit whose champions prepare like athletes.

Why people play

People come to chess for one reason and stay for others: the contest, with results, rankings and a world championship; the moment a position that looked dead turns out to hold a winning idea; a history that runs from early medieval India to a playing hall outside Chennai in 2022; or simply a game to share with a grandparent, a child, or a stranger on the other side of the world.

It is also one of the cheapest serious hobbies there is. A plastic set and a roll-up board cost a few hundred rupees (2026), strong opponents are available free online, and a ten-year-old can beat an adult fairly. Age, size and strength matter less here than in almost any other competitive activity.

Who this guide is for

It is written for four readers at once. The complete beginner may not yet know how a knight moves. The practising player knows the rules, plays at a club, online or in weekend tournaments, and wants to get better. The serious player — a tournament regular, a coach, an arbiter, a parent managing a junior's chess — wants the detail. And the general reader wants the story: how a game from India crossed Persia and Europe and came home to produce world champions.

The main text is written for the first and last of these. The boxes serve the other two.

How the guide is arranged

Part I is the game anywhere in the world: the rules and notation (Stages 2 and 3), playing well (Stages 4 to 7), how to study (Stage 8), tournaments, ratings and online play (Stages 9 to 11), children and variants (Stages 12 and 13), and looking after sets, clocks, books, trophies and the record of your games (Stages 14 and 15). Part II is the Indian story, from chaturanga to the present. The Reference section holds a glossary, further reading and organisations, and the image sourcing sheet.

Three kinds of box run through the book. First Steps boxes tell a beginner what to do today, cheaply. Boxes labelled For the Player carry the numbers, rules and detail a serious player needs. Sidebars are for everyone: a story, a person or an argument.

Stage 2The Board, the Pieces and the Rules

These are the rules as set out in the Laws of Chess published by FIDE, the International Chess Federation, which almost every club and tournament in the world follows. Casual games at home often ignore a rule or two; tournament games do not.

Setting up

The board has sixty-four squares in eight rows and eight columns, alternately light and dark. The rows running across the board are ranks; the columns running from one player to the other are files. The board goes down with a light square in each player's right-hand corner.

Both sides start in the same arrangement. The rooks stand in the corners, the knights beside them, then the bishops. The queen goes on the square of her own colour — the white queen on a light square, the black queen on a dark one — and the king takes the last square beside her. The eight pawns fill the row in front. White always moves first, the players then take turns, and a player may not pass.

How the pieces move

Every piece except the knight is blocked by pieces in its path. A capture is made by moving onto a square occupied by an enemy piece, which is removed from the board. Pieces capture the way they move, with one exception: the pawn moves straight but captures diagonally. The values are a guide to trades, not a law, and Stage 5 explains when they bend.

Three special moves

Castling moves the king and a rook in one turn. The king goes two squares towards a rook, and that rook jumps to the square the king crossed. It is allowed only if neither piece has moved yet, the squares between them are empty, the king is not in check, and the king does not pass through or land on a square attacked by an enemy piece. The rook itself may be attacked, and when castling on the queen's side the rook may cross an attacked square; only the king's path matters.

En passant ("in passing") is a pawn capture. When a pawn advances two squares from its starting square and lands directly beside an enemy pawn, that enemy pawn may capture it as if it had moved only one square. The right exists on the very next move only.

Promotion happens when a pawn reaches the far end of the board. It must be replaced at once by a queen, rook, bishop or knight of its own colour, whatever pieces are already on the board, so a player can have two or more queens. Choosing anything but a queen is underpromotion, and occasionally it is the only move that wins or avoids stalemate.

Check, checkmate and stalemate

A king that is attacked is in check, and the threat must be removed at once: by moving the king, capturing the attacking piece, or putting a piece in between. A player may never make a move that leaves their own king in check. If a king is in check and there is no legal way out, it is checkmate and the game is over. The king is never actually captured.

Stalemate is the opposite trap. If the player to move is not in check but has no legal move at all, the game is drawn, however much material the other side has. Stalemate is one of the commonest ways for a beginner to throw away a won game, which is why Stage 7 returns to it.

How a game ends

A game is won by checkmate, by the opponent resigning, or by the opponent running out of time. It is drawn by agreement, by stalemate, by the same position occurring three times, by fifty moves passing on each side without a capture or a pawn move, or by a dead position, one in which neither side can checkmate by any series of legal moves, such as king against king.

Stage 3Writing the Game Down: Algebraic Notation

Chess players write their games down, and the system almost everyone now uses is algebraic notation. It takes an evening to learn. Once you have it, every chess book, magazine and database opens up, and you can replay any game ever recorded.

Naming the squares

The files are lettered a to h from White's left to White's right. The ranks are numbered 1 to 8 starting from White's side. Every square therefore has a name made of a letter and a number, and that name never changes whichever side of the board you sit. White's king starts on e1, Black's queen on d8, and the four central squares are d4, e4, d5 and e5.

Writing a move

Each piece has a capital letter: K king, Q queen, R rook, B bishop and N knight, because K is already taken. Pawns have no letter. A move is written as the piece's letter followed by the square it moves to, so Nf3 means a knight moves to f3 and e4 means a pawn moves to e4.

• A capture puts x before the square, as in Bxe5. A pawn capture names the file the pawn left, as in exd5.
• Check adds + and checkmate adds #.
• Castling on the king's side is written O-O and on the queen's side O-O-O. FIDE's own Laws write them with zeros.
• Promotion adds the new piece, as in e8Q, often printed e8=Q.
• If two identical pieces could reach the same square, add the file they come from (Nbd2), or the rank if they share a file (R1e2).

Moves are numbered in pairs, White's then Black's: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6. When Black's move is written on its own, three dots stand in for White's, as in 2...Nc6. A result is 1-0 when White wins, 0-1 when Black wins, and ½-½ for a draw.

Here is the short game every beginner meets sooner or later, Scholar's Mate: 1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 Nc6 3.Qh5 Nf6?? 4.Qxf7#. White's queen and bishop both aim at f7, which only the black king defends, and Black's third move ignores the threat. Either 3...g6 or 3...Qe7 would have stopped it. Set it up and play it through; it is the first trick a novice opponent will try, and it only works against someone who has not seen it.

Books add punctuation to judge moves: ! a good move, !! a brilliant one, ? a mistake, ?? a blunder, !? an interesting risk and ?! a dubious try.

The scoresheet

In a standard tournament game each player records both sides' moves on a scoresheet as the game goes on. The move is made on the board first and written afterwards; writing a move down in advance is forbidden. A draw offer is marked with (=). The completed sheet is evidence if a dispute arises, and later it becomes the raw material for analysis (Stage 8) and for your archive (Stage 15).

Older and other notations

English-language books printed before the 1980s often use descriptive notation, in which squares are named from each player's own side and files after the pieces that started on them: P-K4 is 1.e4, and N-KB3 is Nf3. FIDE stopped recognising it for scoresheets in the early 1980s, but it is worth learning to read if you buy second-hand books. Some books use figurine algebraic, with small piece symbols in place of letters, so the same text works in any language.

Stage 4Tactics: Forks, Pins, Skewers and Discovered Attacks

A tactic is a short, forcing sequence that wins something — material, or the game — by exploiting a particular arrangement of pieces. A combination is a tactic that usually begins with a sacrifice. Among beginners and ordinary club players, far more games are decided by a tactic one side missed than by any deep strategic idea, so this is the stage to return to most often.

Almost every tactic feeds on the same weaknesses: a piece left undefended, a king with no escape squares, or two valuable pieces standing where one enemy piece can reach both. Learn to notice those, and the patterns below start to announce themselves.

The fork

A fork is one piece attacking two or more enemy pieces at once. The opponent can save only one. Any piece can fork, but the knight is the most treacherous because its attack does not run along a line, and players simply fail to see it coming. A knight fork of king and queen is called a royal fork; add a rook and players call it a family fork. Pawns fork too, and because the pawn is the cheapest unit, a pawn attacking two pieces almost always wins one of them.

The pin

A pin is an attack on a piece that cannot move, or should not, because a more valuable piece stands behind it on the same line. Only pieces that move along lines — bishops, rooks and queens — can pin. If the piece behind is the king, the pin is absolute and moving the pinned piece is illegal. If it is the queen or a rook, the pin is relative: the move is legal, just expensive.

A pinned piece is a poor defender and a sitting target. The standard way to exploit a pin is to attack the pinned piece again, ideally with a pawn. The standard ways to escape one are to move the valuable piece out of the line, put something in between, or drive the pinning piece away.

The skewer

A skewer is a pin reversed. The more valuable piece is in front; it is attacked and must move, and the piece behind it falls. The commonest form is a check along a rank, file or diagonal: the king steps aside, and the rook or queen standing behind it is captured.

Discovered attacks and double check

A discovered attack happens when one piece moves out of the way and unmasks an attack by a piece behind it. Its power is that the piece that moves can make a threat of its own, so two threats arrive at once. If the unmasked piece gives check, it is a discovered check, and the moving piece can go almost anywhere — even capture a defended queen — because the opponent must deal with the check first.

A double check is a discovered check in which the moving piece also gives check. No single move can block or capture both checking pieces, so the king must move. Double checks lie behind many of the most spectacular mating attacks.

The supporting cast

• Removing the defender captures or drives away the piece that guards something else.
• Deflection forces a defending piece away from the square or line it is guarding.
• Decoy lures a piece, often the king, onto a bad square, usually with a sacrifice.
• Overloading exploits a single piece that has to guard two things at once.
• The back-rank mate is delivered by a rook or queen to a king trapped behind its own unmoved pawns. The cure is a small pawn move that gives the king a square to breathe, often called luft.
• The in-between move, or zwischenzug, is a forcing move played instead of the expected recapture.

Stage 5Strategy and Planning

Tactics are about the next few moves. Strategy is about which positions to aim for when nothing is happening yet, which is most of the time. A player with good strategy keeps arriving at positions where the tactics work in their favour.

The values, and when they bend

The piece values in Stage 2 are averages. A bishop is usually slightly stronger than a knight in open positions with pawns on both sides of the board; a knight is better in closed positions and on a secure central square. Two bishops together, the bishop pair, are an advantage in most open positions. Winning a rook for a bishop or knight is called winning the exchange. Above all, a piece is worth what it does: a rook that cannot get out is worth less than an active knight.

The elements of a position

King safety. An exposed king makes every tactic more dangerous. Castle, and think twice before moving the pawns in front of your castled king.

Piece activity. Pieces belong where they control many squares, especially central ones. The simplest plan when nothing else suggests itself is to find your worst-placed piece and improve it.

Pawn structure. Pawns cannot move backwards, so every pawn move changes the position permanently. An isolated pawn has no friendly pawns on the neighbouring files and must be defended by pieces. Doubled pawns stand one behind the other on the same file. A backward pawn has fallen behind its neighbours and cannot safely advance. A passed pawn has no enemy pawns in front of it on its own or neighbouring files, and grows more valuable as pieces come off.

Squares and files. An outpost is a square, usually in the opponent's half, that no enemy pawn can ever attack; it is ideal for a knight. Rooks want open files with no pawns on them, and a rook on the opponent's second rank is often decisive. A bad bishop is one hemmed in by its own pawns fixed on squares of its colour.

Space. The side controlling more squares has more room to manoeuvre. The side with less space should look for exchanges to relieve the congestion.

Making a plan

A plan does not need to be grand. It needs to answer the question the position is asking. A workable routine:

1. Compare the imbalances — material, the minor pieces, pawn structure, space, development, open files and king safety — and decide what is better and worse for you.
2. Find a target: an enemy weakness, a poorly defended king, a square you could occupy.
3. Ask what your opponent wants. Stopping their plan before it starts is called prophylaxis, and strong players spend much of their thinking time on it.
4. Choose moves that improve your position towards the target, and check for tactics again after every move.

A few long-tested rules of thumb help. When ahead in material, trade pieces rather than pawns; when behind, keep pieces on and look for complications. A single weakness can usually be defended, so the winning method is often to create a second one on the other side of the board. And in a position with locked pawn chains, play on the side of the board towards which your chain points.

Stage 6Opening Principles, Not Memorised Lines

The opening is roughly the first ten to fifteen moves, and it has a simple job: get your pieces into play, claim a share of the centre and make your king safe, while stopping your opponent from doing the same more effectively. Opening books run to thousands of pages, but for almost every player below master strength the principles matter far more than the lines.

The principles

1. Fight for the centre. Pawns on e4 and d4, or e5 and d5 for Black, control the squares the pieces most want to use.
2. Develop your pieces. Bring knights and bishops out towards the centre, usually knights first, before starting any action.
3. Castle early. It tucks the king away and brings a rook towards the centre.
4. Move each piece once in the opening unless there is a concrete reason to move it again.
5. Keep the queen back for the first few moves. Brought out early, she becomes a target and loses time retreating.
6. Do not grab pawns at the cost of development unless you have calculated that it is safe.
7. Connect your rooks by clearing the back rank, then put them on central or open files.
8. Limit pawn moves. Each one leaves squares behind that no pawn can guard again.

Behind all of these is tempo, a unit of time equal to one move. A player who wastes tempi arrives in the middlegame with fewer pieces in play. A gambit deliberately gives up material, usually a pawn, to gain tempi or open lines; the opponent may accept it, decline it, or accept and give it back later.

Why not memorise lines?

Memorised moves fail at the first unexpected reply, and at club level that reply usually comes within the first few moves. A player who knows why each move is played can find a sensible answer when that happens; a player who knows only the sequence is lost. Memorised lines also lead into middlegames the player does not understand, which is worse than a modest opening that reaches a familiar position.

That does not make openings unimportant. As players improve they build a repertoire: one or two first moves as White, and a reply to each of the main first moves as Black. The best way to learn one is to study the middlegame plans and pawn structures it produces, play through complete master games in it, and look up the opening after each of your own games to see where your knowledge ran out.

The name "Indian" in those defences is not a coincidence, and Stage 18 explains where it comes from.

Stage 7The Endgames Every Player Must Know

The endgame is what is left when most of the pieces have been exchanged. It is where won games are thrown away and lost games saved, and knowing a small number of endings well changes how you play the middlegame, because you know which trades lead to a win and which to a draw. In the endgame the king stops hiding and becomes a fighting piece, and it usually belongs in the centre.

The basic checkmates

King and queen against king. Use the queen to push the lone king to the edge of the board, keeping a knight's move away from it, then bring your own king up to help deliver mate. The danger is stalemate: before every queen move, check that the enemy king will still have a legal move. With correct play the mate never takes more than ten moves.

King and rook against king. Slower, and worth practising until it is automatic. The rook cuts the king off along a rank or file and shrinks its box, your own king approaches, and when the two kings stand facing each other with one square between them, the rook checks along the edge. A spare rook move to lose time is often the key. It never needs more than sixteen moves.

King, bishop and knight against king is a forced win, but a hard one, and rare. Two knights cannot force mate at all. Practise the queen and rook mates against a friend or an app from random starting positions until you never fail.

King and pawn against king

This ending decides whether many others are won, which makes it the most useful ending of all to understand.

• The rule of the square. Picture a square with the pawn's path to promotion as one side. If the defending king can step inside that square, it catches the pawn. If it is the pawn's turn to move, picture the square from one step further on.
• The opposition. When the two kings stand on the same file or rank with one square between them, the player who does not have to move is said to have the opposition, and in pawn endings that player usually gets their way. A position in which the obligation to move is itself a disadvantage is called zugzwang, and it decides many pawn endings.
• The practical rule. If the defending king gets directly in front of the pawn, the game is usually drawn. If the attacking king gets in front of its own pawn, especially two squares ahead, it usually wins. The exception is a rook's pawn, on the a- or h-file, which is drawn if the defending king reaches the corner.

Rook endings

Rook endings are the most common endings in practice, and two positions carry much of their theory. In the Lucena position, the attacking side has king and pawn near promotion and wins by building a bridge: the rook goes to the fourth rank so that it can block checks from the side. In the Philidor position, the defender draws by keeping the rook on its own third rank, which stops the enemy king advancing, and then swinging the rook round to check from behind once the pawn moves forward. An old rule adds a third lesson: rooks belong behind passed pawns, whether their own or the enemy's.

Opposite-coloured bishops, where each side has one bishop and they run on different colours, deserve a mention too: those endings are drawn surprisingly often, even a pawn or two down.

Stage 8How to Study: Solving, Analysing and Using Engines

Most players who stop improving are not short of effort. They spend their time in the wrong place, usually playing fast games online and reading about openings. Improvement comes from a few habits kept up over months: solving, slow games, honest analysis and a little endgame work, with openings last.

Solving

Solve puzzles from a diagram or a book without moving the pieces. Calculate the whole line to the end, commit to an answer, and only then check. Themed sets, where every puzzle is a fork, say, build pattern recognition; mixed sets, where you do not know what to look for, are closer to a real game. Many coaches recommend repeating the same set of puzzles until you solve them quickly, because the speed of recognition matters as much as depth. Choose puzzles that make you work: if you solve every one instantly, they are too easy.

Visualisation, seeing the board in your head, improves with practice. Once comfortable, play through book games without setting up every move, and try following short sequences with your eyes closed.

Analysing your own games

Your own games are the best textbook you will ever have, because they contain exactly your mistakes.

1. If your opponent is willing, go over the game together straight afterwards. This post-mortem is a long tournament tradition, and you learn what the other player was thinking.
2. At home, enter the game into a database together with your thoughts during it: what you feared, what you missed, where you spent time.
3. Analyse it yourself first, without an engine. Find the critical moments and work out the alternatives.
4. Only then check it with an engine, and for every big swing in the evaluation, work out why the move was bad.
5. Write a two-line lesson, such as "missed a back-rank threat" or "spent twenty minutes on move 12 and ran short of time".
6. Keep those lessons in one place. The entries that recur are your training plan.

Using engines without letting them think for you

A chess engine is a program that analyses positions. The best, such as the free, open-source Stockfish and the neural-network engine Leela Chess Zero, are far stronger than any human. They are superb at telling you that a move was a mistake, poor at telling you why, and a player who leans on them stops developing judgement of their own.

Engines show an evaluation in pawns: +1.00 means White is better by roughly a pawn's worth, and a negative number favours Black. Small numbers mean little in human terms, and a position the engine calls equal may be very hard to play for one side.

Use an engine after your own analysis, to check it. Use it to play out a critical position against you, which tests whether you really understand why it is winning. Use tablebases for endings. Do not keep the evaluation bar on while watching games, do not memorise engine lines you cannot explain, and never consult one during a game you are playing.

Stage 9Tournament Play: Clocks, Time Controls, Touch-Move and Etiquette

Over-the-board tournaments are where chess becomes a sport. They have rules beyond the moves, enforced by an arbiter, and a culture that newcomers pick up quickly once someone explains it.

The clock

A chess clock is two clocks joined together, only one running at a time. After making your move you press your side, which stops your clock and starts your opponent's. Press with the same hand you moved with. If your time runs out your flag falls and you lose, unless your opponent cannot possibly checkmate (Stage 2).

A time control such as 90+30 means ninety minutes each for the whole game, plus thirty seconds added after every move from move one. The added time is an increment.

Where there is an increment, the category counts the time for sixty moves, so 5+3 (five minutes, plus three more over sixty moves) is still blitz.

Tournament formats

In a Swiss tournament, the usual format for open events, everyone plays in every round, and each round pairs players on similar scores who have not yet met, alternating colours where possible. In a round robin, everyone plays everyone. Knockouts use short matches with faster tie-breaks. Players who finish on equal points are separated by tie-break systems such as Buchholz, which adds up the scores of the opponents each player faced; the regulations must say which tie-breaks apply before the event starts.

Touch-move and the one-hand rule

• If you deliberately touch one of your own pieces, you must move it, provided it has a legal move.
• If you deliberately touch an opponent's piece, you must capture it, if you legally can.
• To straighten a piece on its square, say "I adjust", or the traditional j'adoube, before touching it.
• Once you let go of a piece on a new square, that move stands.
• Moves are made with one hand. Castle by moving the king first; touch the rook first and you may not castle on that move.
• Your opponent must claim a touch-move breach before deliberately touching a piece themselves.

Conduct at the board

Record each move after you make it, never before. In standard games you may stop recording when you have less than five minutes left, unless the increment is thirty seconds or more. Offer a draw only after making your move and before pressing the clock, and do not repeat the offer to unsettle an opponent. Do not talk to your opponent during play, comment on other games, or consult notes. If a dispute arises, pause the clock and call the arbiter rather than arguing.

Electronic devices are the rule that catches most people out. Under FIDE's Laws a player found with a phone or other electronic device on them in the playing venue loses the game, and events that allow devices in bags require them to be completely switched off. The event regulations say exactly what is permitted, smartwatches included.

When the game ends, shake hands, sign both scoresheets with the result, report it as instructed and reset the pieces. Hold any post-mortem outside the playing hall.

Looking after yourself

A standard game can last five hours or more, and some tournaments have two rounds a day for a week. Sleep properly, eat light meals, drink water, and walk between rounds. Do not play through illness: tell the arbiter and withdraw. Anyone who feels chest pain, faintness or difficulty breathing at the board should stop and get medical help at once. No game is worth more.

Stage 10Ratings and Titles

A rating is a number that estimates playing strength from results. The system used by FIDE and most national federations was devised by Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-born American physics professor and keen player, and adopted by the United States Chess Federation in 1960 and by FIDE in 1970. It is named after him, so it is written Elo, not ELO.

How Elo works, in outline

The difference between two players' ratings predicts how they should score against each other. After each game, a player who scored more than predicted gains points, and one who scored less loses them.

The change after a game is the actual score minus the expected score, multiplied by a factor called K. Suppose a player rated 1600 beats one rated 1800, with K at 20. The lower-rated player was expected to score about 0.24, scored 1, and gains 20 × 0.76, roughly fifteen points; the other player loses a similar amount. Even a draw would have earned the lower-rated player about five.

K is set higher for new and young players, so that their ratings move quickly towards their true strength, and lower for established strong players. For many years FIDE used 40, 20 and 10 for those groups. The details — K-factors, how a first rating is calculated, the lowest rating that can be published — are revised from time to time, and the current FIDE Handbook is the only reliable source.

A performance rating is the rating at which a set of results would have been expected: a single number for how you played in one event.

Titles

FIDE awards titles for life. Each requires a rating threshold reached at any time, and the higher titles also require norms: performances at a set level in events with enough titled players and players from other federations. A Grandmaster normally needs three norms covering at least twenty-seven games. Some titles can also be earned directly by results in particular championships.

Women may earn every open title, and many hold both kinds. Whether separate women's titles encourage women's chess or entrench a gap is a long-running argument within the game. FIDE also awards titles to arbiters, such as FIDE Arbiter and International Arbiter, and to coaches, including FIDE Trainer and FIDE Senior Trainer. Stage 22 explains how to get a first rating in India.

Stage 11Online Chess and Fair Play

Far more chess is now played online than over the board. The two largest sites are Chess.com, a commercial service with free and paid tiers, and Lichess, which is free, carries no advertising, and is run as a non-profit on open-source software. Both offer games at every time control, puzzles, lessons, analysis tools and live broadcasts of top events.

Using it well

Online chess is the easiest way to find an opponent at your level at any hour, and the easiest way to waste an evening. Its trap is speed. A diet of one- and three-minute games trains fast reflexes and bad habits, and the instant rematch button makes it easy to keep playing angrily after a loss, which players call tilt. Slower games, fifteen minutes or more a side, reviewed afterwards, do far more for your chess.

Online ratings are separate from FIDE ratings, and they differ from site to site and between time controls. None is truer than another; they are different pools.

Fair play

Using an engine, another person's advice or any analysis tool during a game is cheating, and so is running a program that shows evaluations while you play. Most sites also forbid opening books and databases during live games; rules for slower correspondence-style games vary, so read them. Sites detect cheating by comparing moves with engine choices and by studying patterns of play and behaviour, and they close accounts, including those of titled players. The same principle applies over the board: FIDE has fair-play regulations, and major events use device bans, bag checks, scanners and delayed broadcasts of the moves.

If you suspect an opponent, use the site's report button and let its fair-play team decide. Do not accuse anyone publicly. A lower-rated player having a good day is not evidence, and a false accusation does real harm.

Online etiquette is short. Resign lost games rather than letting the clock run out, never stall, keep the chat civil, and say "good game" whatever the result.

Stage 12Chess for Children

Children can learn chess very young, and many play well sooner than adults expect. What they need is not so much an early start as a happy one.

When and how to start

Many children are ready to learn the moves at around five or six, some earlier and some later. The signs are being able to sit through a short game and wanting to play another. Teach one piece at a time with mini-games that use only a few pieces, and keep sessions short. Let a young child win sometimes, but not always; they notice. Praise effort and good ideas, not results.

What chess does and does not do

Chess teaches concentration, patience, planning, and how to lose and try again, and that is plenty. Some promoters claim loudly that it raises intelligence or school marks, but reviews of the research have found the evidence for broad benefits beyond the board much weaker than those claims. The best reason for a child to play is that they enjoy it.

Tournaments

Children's events are grouped by age, and a first tournament is best a small local one.

For parents, the rules are simple and often broken. Stay outside the playing area. Give no signals and no advice during a game; it is not allowed. Do not discuss the rating after every round. Bring food and water. When a child comes out in tears, ask what they enjoyed and what they learned before anything else, and save the analysis for the next day.

Balance and safety

Chess should sit beside school, sleep and outdoor play, not replace them. Watch for signs of burnout: dread before events, poor sleep, stomach aches before rounds, or joy draining out of the game. If they appear, take a break, and talk to the coach, the school or a doctor if they persist.

Online, children should play with chat off or limited to friends, with no real name, photograph, school or city in the profile, and should never move a conversation with a stranger to another app. Online lessons should take place where a parent can hear them. A coach who insists on privacy from parents is a reason to find another coach.

Stage 13The Main Variants

Chess has always had relatives and offshoots, and playing a variant is one of the best ways to see the ordinary game afresh. Its Asian cousins, from makruk to xiangqi, appear in Stage 17.

Chess960

Chess960, also called Fischer Random after Bobby Fischer, who proposed it in the 1990s, shuffles the back-rank pieces before the game so that memorised openings are useless. The rules are those of ordinary chess, with three conditions on the starting position: the bishops stand on squares of opposite colours, the king stands somewhere between the two rooks, and Black's pieces mirror White's. That allows 960 starting positions. Castling still finishes with king and rook on the same squares as in ordinary chess. FIDE recognises the variant and has held world championships in it. To play at home, shuffle White's pieces within those rules, mirror them for Black, and start.

Other variants

Most of these are available on the main online sites, and bughouse remains the classic noisy club-night game.

Other ways to play the ordinary game

Blindfold chess is played without sight of the board, with moves called aloud. Simultaneous exhibitions, in which one strong player walks round many boards, are how many beginners first play a master. Correspondence chess, with days allowed per move, is organised internationally by the International Correspondence Chess Federation, which permits engine use, so the contest has become one of directing computer analysis. Chess composition is the art of problems ("White to play and mate in two") and endgame studies, with its own world federation, solving championships and titles.

Chess for blind and visually impaired players

Blind and visually impaired players use boards on which squares of one colour are raised and each piece fits into a hole, so it stays put when touched; pieces of one colour carry a small point on top. Each player usually has their own board, and moves are announced aloud. The International Braille Chess Association organises international competition, and India has an active scene of its own.

Storage and Preservation

Stage 14Storage and Care: Sets, Boards, Clocks and Trophies

A chess life accumulates more worth keeping than people expect: a grandfather's set, the board a child learned on, a clock that has survived a hundred tournaments, the trophy from a first open. Few are valuable in money. All are irreplaceable, and most damage to them happens slowly, at home, from causes that are easy to prevent. This stage covers the objects. Stage 15 covers paper, the games archive and the Indian climate that governs both.

The enemies

Relative humidity (RH) is the moisture in the air compared with the most it could hold at that temperature. Wood, bone, ivory, felt and paper absorb and release moisture to match it, swelling as RH rises and shrinking as it falls. Shrinking cracks wood and splits ivory; swelling warps boards and lifts veneer; RH that stays above roughly 65–70% for days grows mould. The swing does more harm than any steady level, because the surface moves faster than the core.

Heat softens glue, plastic and vinyl and speeds corrosion. Light, above all sunlight, fades stained pieces and changes the colour of wood. Pests eat wool felt (clothes moths, carpet beetles) and wood (termites, woodworm). Salt air and acid vapours corrode metal. Handling and well-meant cleaning do the rest.

Wooden sets and boards

Most good sets are boxwood, with the dark pieces in ebony, rosewood or boxwood stained black. Indian workshops, Amritsar above all, make large numbers of sets in sheesham, often sold as Indian rosewood, many of them for export.

Solid pieces rarely crack unless humidity swings sharply. Boards are more vulnerable: a board of glued squares or of veneer has to move with the weather, and where a frame restrains it, joints open and squares split. Veneer also blisters if it gets damp. Keep boards flat, away from windows and air-conditioner outlets, and never put anything hot or wet on them.

Weights and felt. Weighted pieces carry a metal slug in the base under a felt or baize pad, both glued in. Heat softens the glue and the felt peels; on a modern set it can be stuck back with a little white PVA glue. Wool felt feeds clothes moths, so check stored sets for grazed felt and tiny silken cases. In many older sets the weights are lead, which reacts with acid vapours from some woods, fresh paints and varnishes, and new wood-composite boxes, forming a white powdery corrosion that swells and can split the base.

Cleaning. Most sets are lacquered, with a hard glossy film, or waxed. Dust them with a soft brush or a dry microfibre cloth. A cloth barely damp with plain water, followed at once by a dry one, is the most any wooden piece should get. A waxed set can take a very thin coat of good paste wax once a year at most, buffed off completely; a lacquered one needs nothing.

Vintage and antique sets

Older sets come in boxwood and ebony, bone (often stained red), ivory, sandalwood, horn, lacquered or painted wood, and early plastics. Indian craftsmen made fine carved sets for European buyers in the colonial period, some showing the armies of the East India Company facing Indian forces, and these now turn up in collections worldwide.

Bone and ivory crack along their grain when humidity drops or swings, and yellow or fade unevenly in light. Never wash or oil them, and keep them from sunlight and heat. Elephant ivory cut across usually shows a fine criss-cross pattern called Schreger lines, while bone shows small dark pores; never try the old "hot needle" test, which burns the piece. Celluloid, an early plastic often used as imitation ivory, can decay and give off acidic fumes that damage whatever is stored with it, and it is flammable, so keep celluloid sets apart, ventilated and away from heat.

Ivory and the law in India. Elephant ivory is covered by the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, and trade in ivory, whether of Indian or imported origin, has been prohibited in India for decades. An ivory set should therefore not be bought, sold or offered for sale here. Whether and how a private owner may keep an inherited piece depends on declaration and certification rules under the Act, which have changed over the years; ask your state's Chief Wildlife Warden's office or a lawyer before selling, gifting, exporting or even advertising one. Separately, an object more than a hundred years old may count as an antiquity under the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972, which restricts export.

Find a conservator, rather than repairing anything yourself, when an antique set shows cracks, loose parts, lifting lacquer, corrosion powder, or small round holes with fresh pale dust beside them, the sign of active woodworm.

Plastic pieces and roll-up boards

Heat distorts plastic pieces, so never leave a set in a car or on a sunny windowsill. Unweighted plastic pieces can be washed in lukewarm water with a drop of mild detergent and dried at once; weighted, felted ones should only be wiped. Vinyl roll-up boards contain plasticisers that migrate out over time, faster in heat, so an old board turns sticky and can mark lacquered wood or plastics it rests against. Roll them loosely with the playing surface outwards, so the edges lie down when unrolled; never fold them; wipe them with a damp cloth. Silicone boards can be washed with mild soap.

Digital clocks

Batteries are what kill clocks. Alkaline cells left inside for months can leak a caustic white crust that corrodes the contacts, so take them out whenever a clock will sit unused for more than a few weeks, never mix old and new cells, and keep a spare set in your chess bag. If you find leakage, wear gloves, keep your hands away from your eyes, remove the cells, clean light deposits with a cotton bud barely moistened with white vinegar, and dry thoroughly; heavy corrosion needs a repairer. Keep clocks out of sunlight and damp, and clean them with a dry or barely damp cloth, never a spray.

Trophies and medals

Most trophies are plated metal, painted resin or plastic on bases of wood, marble or plastic, held together by a threaded rod. Dust them with a soft brush and wipe with a barely damp cloth, but never immerse one, because water trapped inside rusts the rod. Metal polish wears through plating and the clear lacquer over it, and so does the traditional tamarind, lemon or salt rub used on brass vessels. Store medals individually in soft cloth or polyethylene pouches, not soft PVC, with ribbons laid flat and out of the light. In coastal cities keep metal in closed cupboards with silica gel.

Handling, display and travel

Handle antique pieces with clean, dry hands, holding each by its body rather than a king's cross or a knight's ears, which break first. Nitrile gloves suit lead-weighted or corroded pieces; cotton gloves snag on carving and make pieces easier to drop. Pack pieces for travel in a slotted box or cloth bags, never loose, and carry a good set in hand luggage.

Display a good set in a closed glass cabinet away from windows, lit by LED lamps, which give off very little ultraviolet and less heat than older bulbs. Put it away for a few months each year, to rest it from light and to inspect it closely.

Stage 15Preservation and Archiving: Books, Scoresheets and the Indian Climate

Paper and data carry a chess life's memory: books, magazines, certificates, and above all the scoresheets of your own games, which exist nowhere else in the world. This stage covers keeping them, then the climate that decides how long everything in this band survives.

Chess books and magazines

Many chess books, especially cheap editions from past decades, were printed on acidic wood-pulp paper that yellows and turns brittle, faster in heat and humidity; this can be slowed but not reversed at home. Foxing, the brown spotting on old pages, comes from mould and impurities in the paper, and both need moisture.

Shelve books upright and supported, but not packed so tightly that air cannot move, and lay very large books flat. Keep shelves a few centimetres off the back wall, and never against an outside wall or one shared with a bathroom. Keep magazines upright in closed boxes of acid-free board, and leave their staples alone, but keep them dry so the staples do not rust.

Silverfish and cockroaches eat the starch in paper and bindings, and termites come into shelves from walls and floors. Look along the shelves each month for droppings, grazed surfaces, mud tubes and fine dust. Do not put naphthalene balls in bookcases: they are a health hazard and do not stop most of what eats paper. Dried neem leaves do little harm if kept bone dry and replaced often, but they are no substitute for looking.

Never mend a valuable book with sticky tape, which yellows and stains. Keep acidic newspaper cuttings out of books; scan them, and store the originals separately in polyester sleeves. Stand a wet book with its pages fanned open in a cool room with a fan running, out of direct sun and never under a hairdryer. If many books are soaked, bagging and freezing them holds off mould until they can be dried properly.

Scoresheets and the games archive

The paper. Tournament scoresheets are often carbonless duplicates, one copy for the organiser and one for the player. The copy fades with light and heat and can be damaged by soft plastics, and pencil smudges. Store scoresheets flat and in date order, in acid-free folders or polyester or polypropylene sleeves, inside a closed box, with any missing event, round, date or opponent added on the back in pencil. Never staple, clip or laminate them.

Digitising. Enter each game into a database within a day or two, while you still remember what an illegible scrawl meant, and mark any doubtful move with a comment. Then photograph or scan the sheet flat, evenly lit and square, at 300 dpi or better, and name the files so they sort by date, for example "2026-01-18 Chennai Open R5 Surname".

The database. Keep your master archive in PGN (Stage 3), because plain text will stay readable by any chess program for decades. Databases in a program's own format, such as ChessBase or the free SCID, are convenient for searching, but export the collection to PGN regularly. Download your game archives from online sites from time to time, since accounts get closed and services change.

Backups. Follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two kinds of storage, one kept somewhere else — for example the laptop, an external drive at home, and a cloud copy or a drive left with a relative. Once a year, check a backup by actually opening files from it.

Certificates

Do not laminate certificates. Lamination is permanent, its heat and adhesive damage paper and ink, and it cannot be undone. Keep originals flat in polyester sleeves inside an acid-free folder, and scan them. To display one, frame a copy, or frame the original behind UV-filtering glazing with an acid-free mount, on an inside wall out of sunlight. Inkjet-printed certificates run if they get wet.

The Indian climate

Across most of India the monsoon brings months of relative humidity above 80%, and in Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and other coastal cities the air stays humid, and salty, for much of the year. Chennai receives much of its heaviest rain from the north-east monsoon late in the year, so its dangerous season comes later than Mumbai's. North India does the opposite in summer — heat above 40 °C, very dry air and pre-monsoon dust storms — and then the monsoon's damp arrives within weeks. That swing from very dry to very wet is exactly what cracks wood and ivory and cockles paper. Keep cupboards and boxes closed during dust storms, which drive fine grit into clocks and shelves.

Two local hazards stand out. Power cuts stop air-conditioners and dehumidifiers, and the humidity in a closed room can climb within hours. Termites live in the walls and floors of many buildings and move into wooden cupboards and boxes that touch them.

Practical answers, cheapest first:

• A digital hygrometer, a few hundred rupees (2026), tells you what is really happening. To check one, seal it in a plastic box with a saucer of table salt mixed to a damp paste; after about a day it should read close to 75%.
• Silica gel in closed boxes and cupboards absorbs moisture without power, which makes it the answer to power cuts. Buy the orange indicating kind, which changes colour as it fills; the older blue kind contains cobalt chloride, a harmful chemical, and children should handle neither. Dry it again on a tray in a low oven, around 110–120 °C, for an hour or two, or as the maker directs, and let it cool in a sealed jar. Uncooked rice is a poor substitute and attracts insects.
• Closed plastic boxes with silica gel make a small, stable climate for a set, a clock or a scoresheet archive. Never seal anything damp inside one.
• A dehumidifier or an electronic dry cabinet suits a larger collection, with silica gel as the fall-back when the power fails.

Where to keep things. An interior room, often a bedroom, on an inside wall and a middle shelf. Not the kitchen, a bathroom wall, a balcony, a garage, a car, or the loft space above a door, which traps heat and dust. Not under an air-conditioner outlet, and never on the floor, where wet-mopping, floodwater and termites all reach. Steel almirahs resist termites but can sweat and rust near the coast, so put silica gel inside; stand wooden ones a little away from the wall on a raised base. New plywood and particleboard furniture gives off vapours, including acids, for months, so air it before storing anything in it.

Disaster planning

Decide now what you would carry out of a flood or fire, in order: the backup drive or device holding your archive, the folder of original scoresheets and certificates, then the one set or trophy that matters most. Keep them together in a waterproof box on a high shelf. Fire-resistant safes are built to protect paper, not necessarily drives, which fail at lower temperatures, so the off-site copy is the real fire protection. Photograph valuable sets and trophies, keep receipts with the inventory, and ask your insurer whether collectables must be listed separately. If something is badly damaged, ask a conservator before drying, flattening or cleaning it.

Stage 16Chaturanga: Where Chess Began, and How Sure We Can Be

Ask where chess was invented and most books answer India, and most historians agree. But the evidence for that answer is thinner and later than the confidence with which it is often stated, and an honest account has to show both the consensus and its gaps.

The consensus

The prevailing view, given its scholarly foundation by H. J. R. Murray's A History of Chess (1913), is that chess began in India. Most historians now place a recognisable ancestor of the game in northern India by about the sixth or seventh century CE. Its name was chaturanga, a Sanskrit word meaning "four limbs", after the four divisions of an ancient Indian army: chariots, elephants, cavalry and infantry. From India the game passed to Sasanian Persia, where it was called chatrang, and after the Arab conquest of Persia it became shatranj, the game that later reached Europe (Stage 17).

The evidence

The case rests on three kinds of source.

• Sanskrit literature. Texts from around the seventh century, most often Bana's Harshacharita, a life of King Harsha, contain wordplay usually read as referring to the game. Such passages suggest it was familiar to courtly readers, but they do not describe its rules.
• Persian tradition. A Middle Persian text on chess and backgammon tells how an Indian king sent the game to the court of the Persian emperor Khusrau I, in the sixth century, as a challenge to his wise men. Ferdowsi retold the story in the Shahnameh, completed around 1010. Persian and later Arabic writers consistently said that chess came from India.
• Writers on India. In the eleventh century the scholar al-Biruni described the Indian chess of his day, including a four-handed version played with dice.

What we do not know

Almost everything specific is uncertain. No early Indian rulebook survives, so the moves of the chaturanga pieces are largely reconstructed backwards from shatranj, whose rules Arabic writers recorded in detail. The date is uncertain by a century or more, and so is the place: various parts of northern India and the borderlands with Central Asia have all been proposed. Whether the two-player game came before the four-handed dice game was argued over in the nineteenth century; most historians now think the two-player game came first. Archaeology has not settled anything. A few carved figures from Central Asia have been claimed as very early chessmen, but their dating, and even whether they are game pieces at all, are disputed.

There are dissenting theories too. The best known, argued by the historian of science Joseph Needham among others, links the origins of chess to China; it has won few supporters, but it is a reminder that the Indian origin is a consensus built on the balance of evidence, not a proven fact.

Stage 17Shatranj: Through Persia and Beyond

After the Arab conquests of the seventh century, the game spread across the Islamic world, and in Abbasid Baghdad, from the eighth century onwards, shatranj became a serious intellectual pursuit. Masters were graded by strength, played before caliphs and wrote treatises. The most celebrated, as-Suli, who lived in the tenth century, remained a byword for skill long after his death. Composers set mansubat, problem positions built to look like real games, and many survive.

How shatranj was played

Shatranj used the same board and the same starting arrangement as modern chess, but several pieces were far weaker:

• The firz, ancestor of the queen, moved one square diagonally.
• The fil, ancestor of the bishop, jumped exactly two squares diagonally, and could reach only eight squares of the whole board.
• Pawns moved one square at a time and promoted only to a firz.
• There was no castling.
• Capturing every enemy piece except the king, leaving a bare king, won the game; how stalemate was treated varied between writers.

The king, knight and rook moved as they do today.

Into Europe

The game reached Europe by several routes, through Muslim Spain and Sicily and through contact with Byzantium, and by around the eleventh century it was known across much of the continent. In 1283 the Libro de los juegos, a book of games made for King Alfonso X of Castile, recorded chess problems alongside dice and table games in illuminated pages. The Lewis chessmen, carved largely from walrus ivory, found on the Scottish island of Lewis in 1831 and usually dated to the twelfth century, show how thoroughly Europe had absorbed the game.

The decisive change came in southern Europe in the late fifteenth century, when the queen gained her modern long-range move and the bishop its full diagonal. The faster game was soon in print, including a book published in Spain around 1497 by Lucena. Castling settled into its modern form, en passant spread, and by the nineteenth century the rules were essentially those of Stage 2. In 1849 the London firm of Jaques began selling pieces in the design now called the Staunton pattern, after the English champion Howard Staunton who endorsed it, and it became the standard for competition worldwide.

The game in the East

Chess travelled east as well as west. The Thai game makruk and the Burmese sittuyin keep features close to shatranj, such as a counsellor that moves one step. Japanese shogi and Chinese xiangqi differ more, and historians still argue over how directly they connect to the Indian game.

Stage 18Chess in India Before and After Independence

Chess never left India. Through the medieval and Mughal centuries it was played at courts and in households, and players at the board appear in Indian painting. But the Indian game went its own way, and by the nineteenth century there was a distinct Indian chess, with local rules that differed from those settling in Europe. Accounts vary by region, but commonly described features include pawns without the double step, promotion rules that depended on the file, and differences in castling or a special leap for the king.

Calcutta and the Indian defences

In mid-nineteenth-century Calcutta, the Scottish master John Cochrane played a very large number of games against a Bengali player, Moheschunder Bannerjee, and many were published. Bannerjee often developed his bishops on the long diagonals — fianchettoed them — a set-up European players then found odd. The name "Indian" for the defences built on that idea is usually traced back to those games, although it caught on only in the twentieth century, when such openings became fashionable.

The period also left one of the best-loved works of Indian cinema. Satyajit Ray's Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977), from a story by Premchand, follows two noblemen of Lucknow so absorbed in chess that they barely notice the British annexing their kingdom in 1856.

After independence

The All India Chess Federation was founded in 1951 and brought Indian chess into FIDE's international framework, with national championships played under the standard rules. For several decades India's strength was modest by world standards. Manuel Aaron of Tamil Nadu became the country's first International Master in 1961 and dominated the national championship for years. Cultural links with the Soviet Union, then the world's chess superpower, brought Soviet players and coaching literature to India, and in Madras the Tal Chess Club, named after the former world champion Mikhail Tal, became a nursery for young players — among them a small boy called Viswanathan Anand.

Anand became India's first Grandmaster in 1988 (Stage 19). Dibyendu Barua of Kolkata followed in 1991 and Pravin Thipsay of Mumbai in 1997. Then the numbers accelerated sharply, and by the end of 2024 India had more than eighty Grandmasters.

Women's chess followed its own path. S. Vijayalakshmi was one of its pioneers, earning both the Woman Grandmaster and International Master titles. In 2002 Koneru Humpy became the first Indian woman to win the full Grandmaster title, at fifteen, then the youngest woman ever to do so.

Stage 19Viswanathan Anand

No single person has shaped a nation's chess the way Viswanathan Anand shaped India's. He was its first Grandmaster, its first world champion, and for three decades the proof that an Indian could reach the very top.

The making of a champion

Anand was born on 11 December 1969 in Mayiladuthurai, Tamil Nadu, and grew up largely in Madras, now Chennai. His mother, Susheela, taught him the game, and he learned at the Tal Chess Club. Part of his childhood was spent in Manila, where his father was working and where, by his own account, he solved the puzzles set on a television chess programme. From the start he was astonishingly quick, and early in his career he was nicknamed the "Lightning Kid" for how fast he played, even in slow games.

In 1987 he won the World Junior Championship, the first Asian to do so, and in 1988 he became India's first Grandmaster. By the early 1990s he was among the handful of players with a realistic claim to the world title.

World champion

Through the 1990s the world championship was split between FIDE and a breakaway organisation, and Anand fought in both. He lost a title match to Garry Kasparov in New York in 1995 and, after winning FIDE's knockout event, lost the final match to the titleholder Anatoly Karpov in Lausanne in 1998. In 2000 he won the FIDE knockout championship, played partly in New Delhi, beating Alexei Shirov in the final in Tehran.

The title was reunified in 2006, and in 2007 Anand won the world championship tournament in Mexico City to become undisputed champion. He defended it in matches against Vladimir Kramnik in Bonn in 2008, Veselin Topalov in Sofia in 2010 and Boris Gelfand in Moscow in 2012, the last decided by rapid tie-breaks. In 2013 he lost the title to Magnus Carlsen in a match held in Chennai. He won the 2014 Candidates Tournament to earn a rematch and lost again to Carlsen, in Sochi, later that year. Well into his forties he remained formidable, and in 2017 he won the World Rapid Championship.

What his career did for Indian chess

It is hard to overstate. Before Anand, chess in India was a respectable pastime with a small competitive circuit. His rise gave parents a reason to take a child to a chess class, sponsors a reason to fund tournaments and players, and newspapers a reason to report the game. He was the first recipient, for 1991–92, of the award now called the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna, India's highest sporting honour, and in 2007 he received the Padma Vibhushan.

Chennai, and Tamil Nadu more widely, became the centre of Indian chess and has produced a large share of the country's Grandmasters.

In later years he turned deliberately to what would come after him. In 2019 he published a memoir, Mind Master, written with Susan Ninan. In 2020 the WestBridge Anand Chess Academy was set up with his involvement to mentor a group of India's strongest young players, several of whom appear in Stage 20. And in 2022 he was elected Deputy President of FIDE, at the General Assembly held in Chennai during the Olympiad.

Stage 20The Generation After Anand

Anand's success did not produce a single successor so much as a flood. From the late 1990s Indian players began to earn titles in numbers, and in the 2010s and 2020s a generation that had grown up with engines, online play and Anand on television arrived at the top of the world game. This account runs to the end of 2024.

The first wave

Koneru Humpy, from Andhra Pradesh, was for many years among the strongest women in the world, and won the Women's World Rapid Championship in 2019 and again in 2024. Harika Dronavalli became India's second woman Grandmaster and won medals at women's world championships. Among the men, Pentala Harikrishna and Krishnan Sasikiran became long-serving team players and regulars in strong international events. At Tromsø, Norway, in 2014, India's open team won its first Olympiad medal, a bronze.

The new generation

Vidit Gujrathi of Nashik won the FIDE Grand Swiss in 2023. Arjun Erigaisi, from Telangana, rose rapidly and in 2024 became only the second Indian, after Anand, to be rated above 2800. Nihal Sarin of Kerala was among the most gifted prodigies of his generation.

From Chennai came a brother and sister. R. Praggnanandhaa became a Grandmaster at twelve and in 2023 reached the final of the FIDE World Cup, losing to Magnus Carlsen on tie-breaks. His elder sister R. Vaishali won the Women's Grand Swiss in 2023 and became a Grandmaster at the end of that year, making them the first brother and sister both to hold the title. Divya Deshmukh of Nagpur won the World Junior Girls' Championship in 2024.

And there was D. Gukesh, also from Chennai, who became a Grandmaster in 2019 at twelve years and seven months, then the second-youngest in history. In 2024 India sent three players to the Candidates Tournament in Toronto, which decides the world champion's challenger — Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Vidit — while Humpy and Vaishali played in the women's event. Gukesh, at seventeen, won it, the youngest player ever to do so.

Budapest 2024

At the Chess Olympiad in Budapest in September 2024, India won gold in both the open and the women's sections, the country's first gold medals at an over-the-board Olympiad. The open team was Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi, Vidit Gujrathi and Pentala Harikrishna; the women's team was Harika Dronavalli, R. Vaishali, Divya Deshmukh, Vantika Agrawal and Tania Sachdev. Gukesh, Arjun and Divya were among the individual board gold medallists.

Why it happened

No single cause explains the boom. Anand's example came first. India's busy circuit of inexpensive rated open tournaments gave ambitious children a great many games, computers and online play removed the old disadvantage of distance from Europe's chess centres, and coaches, sponsors and employers built support around the most promising. Families made large sacrifices too, and for every titled player, many spent heavily on a dream that did not come true.

Stage 21The Chennai Olympiad, 2022

The Chess Olympiad is the game's great team event, normally held every two years; the first official Olympiad was played in London in 1927. National teams compete in an open section and a women's section, each team has five players of whom four play in each round, and recent Olympiads have run over eleven rounds of a Swiss system. Until 2022, India had never hosted one.

Four months

The 44th Olympiad had been awarded to Russia. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, FIDE moved the event, and India's federation, backed by the government of Tamil Nadu, offered to host it. The organisers had roughly four months to prepare an event normally planned over years.

It was held at Mamallapuram, the coastal town south of Chennai famous for its Pallava-era monuments, from late July to early August 2022, with the opening ceremony in Chennai. Teams from well over 150 countries took part. The event also saw the first Olympiad torch relay, a tradition FIDE introduced that year, which began in Delhi and travelled across India before reaching Tamil Nadu. The mascot was Thambi, a chess knight dressed in a veshti and shirt, and Chennai was dressed for the occasion with chess imagery across the city. As host, India was entitled to field extra teams, and entered three in each section.

The results

The open section produced a surprise: a young Uzbekistan team, seeded well down the list, won gold. India 2, a team of teenagers and young players — Gukesh, Nihal Sarin, Praggnanandhaa, B. Adhiban and Raunak Sadhwani — took bronze, and Gukesh won the gold medal on board one. In the women's section, India 1 — Koneru Humpy, Harika Dronavalli, R. Vaishali, Tania Sachdev and Bhakti Kulkarni — were in contention for gold until the final rounds and finished with bronze.

Stage 22The Federation, Coaching, Academies and Chess in Schools

The federation

The All India Chess Federation is the national governing body for chess in India and India's member federation in FIDE. It works through affiliated state associations, which in turn work with district associations. Between them they run the national championships for men and women and the national age-group championships, select Indian teams for Olympiads and international youth events, approve and oversee rated tournaments, and handle player registration.

To play FIDE-rated chess in India a player generally needs to be registered with the federation, which also arranges the FIDE ID every rated player has. Registration usually carries an annual fee, and because the procedure changes from time to time, check your state association's current rules.

Tournaments

India has one of the busiest tournament circuits in the world. Large FIDE-rated open tournaments, the biggest with several hundred players, run on most weekends somewhere in the country, alongside events restricted to players below a set rating, age-group championships, and unrated local events suitable for beginners. Entry fees commonly run from several hundred to a few thousand rupees (2026), often with concessions for women, juniors or titled players, and prizes are awarded by overall rank and in categories such as best woman, best junior and best veteran. Open tournaments are also where a club player can sit down opposite a Grandmaster.

Coaching and academies

Coaching in India ranges from a school's weekly chess period to local academies, big-city academies with many coaches, online classes, and private training with titled players. Fees vary enormously with city, format and the coach's standing. As a very rough guide, group classes cost from a few hundred to a few thousand rupees a month, and private lessons with strong titled coaches a great deal more (2026).

A coach's own rating matters less than their teaching. Good coaching sets homework and checks it, looks closely at the student's own games, teaches endgames and calculation rather than only openings, reports progress honestly, and keeps chess in proportion with school and rest. FIDE awards trainer titles, which tell you a coach has met an international standard, but many excellent teachers of beginners hold none.

Chess in schools

Many Indian schools run chess clubs or teach chess as an activity, often with visiting coaches, and inter-school tournaments are common. For a school the case is simple and needs no exaggeration: chess is cheap, inclusive, played on equal terms by girls and boys, and teaches concentration and good sporting conduct. A school club needs a few sets, a large demonstration board, a teacher willing to keep order, and a regular slot in the week.

Beyond the board

Chess can also lead to education and employment. Public-sector employers, including the Railways and petroleum companies, have long recruited strong players under sports quotas, giving many Indian titled players a stable income while they competed. And the online boom of the pandemic years, driven in part by Indian streamers and chess media, brought in a large new audience that now follows top events live.

Glossary

A

Algebraic notation — The standard way of recording moves, naming each square by its file letter and rank number. [Stage 3]

B

Back-rank mate — Checkmate by a rook or queen against a king trapped behind its own pawns. [Stage 4]

Blitz — A game with ten minutes or less for each player. [Stage 9]

C

Castling — The move of king and rook together, the king moving two squares towards the rook. [Stage 2]

Chaturanga — The early Indian game from which chess descends; Sanskrit for "four limbs". [Stage 16]

Check — An attack on the king, which must be answered at once. [Stage 2]

Checkmate — Check from which there is no legal escape, ending the game. [Stage 2]

Chess960 — A variant in which the back-rank pieces start in one of 960 shuffled positions; also called Fischer Random. [Stage 13]

D

Dead position — A position in which neither side can checkmate by any legal sequence of moves; the game is drawn. [Stage 2]

Discovered attack — An attack unmasked when a piece moves off a line. [Stage 4]

E

Elo rating — The rating system devised by Arpad Elo and used by FIDE. [Stage 10]

En passant — The capture of a pawn that has just advanced two squares, by an enemy pawn standing beside it. [Stage 2]

F

FEN — Forsyth–Edwards Notation, a one-line description of a position. [Stage 3]

Fianchetto — Developing a bishop on a long diagonal, from b2, g2, b7 or g7. [Stage 18]

FIDE — The International Chess Federation, which sets the Laws of Chess and awards ratings and titles. [Stage 2]

Fork — One piece attacking two or more enemy pieces at once. [Stage 4]

Foxing — Brown spotting on old paper, caused by mould and impurities in damp conditions. [Stage 15]

G

Gambit — An opening in which material, usually a pawn, is offered for time or open lines. [Stage 6]

Grandmaster — The highest title FIDE awards for playing strength. [Stage 10]

I

Increment — Time added to a player's clock after each move. [Stage 9]

L

Lucena position — The winning method in rook and pawn against rook, by building a bridge. [Stage 7]

O

Opposition — Kings facing each other with one square between them; the side not to move has it. [Stage 7]

P

Passed pawn — A pawn with no enemy pawns ahead of it on its own or neighbouring files. [Stage 5]

PGN — Portable Game Notation, the plain-text format for storing games. [Stage 3]

Philidor position — The drawing method in rook and pawn against rook, with the defending rook on its own third rank. [Stage 7]

Pin — An attack on a piece that cannot or should not move because a more valuable piece stands behind it. [Stage 4]

Promotion — Replacing a pawn that reaches the far rank with a queen, rook, bishop or knight. [Stage 2]

Prophylaxis — Play that prevents the opponent's plan before it starts. [Stage 5]

R

Rapid — A game with more than ten and less than sixty minutes for each player. [Stage 9]

Relative humidity — The moisture in the air as a percentage of the most it could hold at that temperature. [Stage 14]

Rule of the square — A quick test of whether a king can catch a passed pawn. [Stage 7]

S

Schreger lines — The criss-cross pattern visible where elephant ivory has been cut across. [Stage 14]

Shatranj — The Persian and Arabic form of chess, played before the modern rules. [Stage 17]

Skewer — An attack on a valuable piece that forces it to move and exposes a piece behind it. [Stage 4]

Stalemate — A position in which the player to move is not in check but has no legal move; a draw. [Stage 2]

Swiss system — A tournament format that pairs players on similar scores in each round. [Stage 9]

T

Touch-move — The rule that a deliberately touched piece must be moved, or captured if it is the opponent's. [Stage 9]

U

Underpromotion — Promoting a pawn to a piece other than a queen. [Stage 2]

Z

Zugzwang — A position in which the obligation to move is itself a disadvantage. [Stage 7]

Zwischenzug — An in-between move played instead of the expected recapture. [Stage 4]

Further Reading and Organisations

Rules and governing bodies

• FIDE, the International Chess Federation, whose Handbook contains the Laws of Chess and the rating, title and fair-play regulations.
• All India Chess Federation, and the state chess associations affiliated to it.
• Asian Chess Federation.
• International Correspondence Chess Federation.
• World Federation for Chess Composition.
• International Braille Chess Association.
• World Chess Hall of Fame, St Louis, United States.

History

• H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (1913), the foundation of the subject.
• H. J. R. Murray, A Short History of Chess, published after his death.
• Richard Eales, Chess: The History of a Game (1985).
• David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess.
• Daniel King, Sultan Khan: The Indian Servant Who Became Chess Champion of the British Empire.
• Viswanathan Anand with Susan Ninan, Mind Master (2019).
• Satyajit Ray's film Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977), and the Premchand story on which it is based.

Learning and improving

• José Raúl Capablanca, Chess Fundamentals.
• Irving Chernev, Logical Chess: Move by Move.
• Bobby Fischer, Stuart Margulies and Donn Mosenfelder, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess.
• Aron Nimzowitsch, My System.
• Alexander Kotov, Think Like a Grandmaster.
• Jeremy Silman, How to Reassess Your Chess and Silman's Complete Endgame Course.
• Mark Dvoretsky, Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual.
• Jesús de la Villa, 100 Endgames You Must Know.
• Mauricio Flores Rios, Chess Structures: A Grandmaster Guide.
• Axel Smith and Hans Tikkanen, The Woodpecker Method.
• Rob Brunia and Cor van Wijgerden, the Steps Method workbooks, for teaching children.

Care and conservation in India

• Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), which runs conservation centres and can advise on or refer work on paper and objects.
• National Research Laboratory for Conservation of Cultural Property, Lucknow.
• For ivory, the office of the Chief Wildlife Warden of your state.

Image Sourcing Sheet