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The Chess portal

Chessis an abstract strategy board gamefor two players. It is played on a square boardof eight rows (known as ranks) and eight columns (known as files), giving sixty-four squares of alternating color. Each player begins the game with sixteen pieces, each of which moves in a prescribed manner; each player's pieces comprise eight pawns, two knights, two bishops, two rooks, one queenand one king. All pieces can remove opponent's pieces by landing on the space they occupy. Pieces are progressively eliminated as the game proceeds, and the ultimate object of the game is to deliver checkmateto the opponent, i.e., to prevent his or her king from moving to escape capture.

Chess is one of the world's most popular games; it has been described not only as a game but also as an art and a science. Chess is sometimes seen as an abstract wargame; as a mental martial art, such that teaching chess has been advocated as a way of enhancing mental prowess. Chess is played both recreationally and competitively in clubs, tournaments, online, and by mail (correspondence chess).

Many variants and relatives of chess are played throughout the world. Chess is thought to have evolved from the Indian chaturanga and later to have developed into Chinese xiangqi, Japanese shogi, Korean janggi, and Thai makruk; in view of its many relatives, chess in Asia is often referred to as Western or international chess.

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Selected article of the week

The Göttingen manuscript is the earliest known work devoted entirely to modern chess. It is a Latin text of 33 leaves held at the University of Göttingen. A quarto parchment manuscript of 33 leaves, ff. 1–15a are a discussion of twelve chess openings, f. 16 is blank, and ff. 17–31b are a selection of thirty chess problems, one on each page with a diagram and solution. Authorship and exact date of the manuscript are unknown. Similarities to Lucena's Repeticion de Amores e Arte de Axedres con CL iuegos de partido have lead some scholars to surmise that it was written by Lucena or that it was one of Lucena's sources. Although the manuscript is generally assumed to be older than Lucena's work, this is not established. The manuscript has been ascribed possible writing dates of 1500–1505 or 1471.

The manuscript is exclusively devoted to modern chess (using the modern rules of movement for the pawn, bishop, and queen, although castling had not yet taken its current form), and no mention is made of the earlier form. The rules are not explained, so the manuscript must have been written at a time and place when the new rules were well established, or it was addressed to a player familiar with the new rules. The addressee of the manuscript is not named, but was evidently a nobleman of high rank. Some particulars of the manuscript suggest that the author was from Spain or Portugal and that it was copied at some point in France, although this is not certain.

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Reviewed articles

Featured articles A-class articles Good articles Chess Bughouse chess Alexander Alekhine The Turk First-move advantage in chess Endgame tablebase Stuart Milner-Barry

The knight's tour is a chess problem in which a knight is placed on an empty chessboard and, moving consistent with the rules of chess, must visit each square exactly once. Although the tour is most often completed by chess players, especially at expositions whilst blindfolded, and was renownedly solved by The Turk, a chess-playing automaton hoax, it is most often studied as a mathematical problem, an instance of a general Hamiltonian path problem in graph theory which can be solved in linear time. Under the most restrictive conditions, those requiring that the knight finishes on a square whence it attacks its starting square (closed) and that the knight begin on a specified square (producing a directed path), there are exactly 26,534,728,821,064 solutions to the problem; many other solutions are not bound by the former constraint and are known as open tours (example pictured).

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Selected biography

Yasser Seirawan (born March 24, 1960) is an American Grandmaster and chess author, best known as a player for having won the 1979 World Junior Chess Championship and four times between 1981 and 2000 the United States Chess Championship and as an activist for having in 2002 negotiated an ultimately-scuttled agreement to unite the world chess championship.

Seirawan was born in Damascus, Syria, to an Arab father and English mother and lived for a short time in Nottingham before immigrating with his family to the United States in 1967. He began playing chess aged twelve years and captured the Washington junior championship soon thereafter, in 1973. Seirawan honed his game over the years following at a Seattle coffeehouse frequented by Latvian chess master Viktors Pupols before winning the world junior championship at the age of nineteen. Seirawan defeated Swiss Grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi, then the world's second-ranked player, in a tournament in 1980 and was invited to train with Korchnoi in Switzerland in preparation for the latter's 1981 world championship rematch with Russian Grandmaster Anatoly Karpov; Seirawan would himself defeat world champion Karpov in 1982. Having won the United States championship jointly with Walter Browne in 1981, Seirawan won the title outright in 1986 and was a member of the bronze medal-winning United States team at the Chess Olympiad contested in Dubai in that year.

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Selected game

The immortal losing game was a famous chess game played between Soviet Grandmaster David Bronstein and Polish International Master Bogdan Śliwa in 1957 in Gotha, Germany. Named in allusion to the celebrated immortal game played 106 years thither, the game saw Śliwa, playing with the white pieces, earn the exchange and a winning position by the sixteenth move and thereafter avoid a series of elegant traps set by Bronstein in an effort to swindle a win or draw.

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News

For chess news, see 2008 in sports, the 2008 in chess category, the current sports events portal, or the Wikinews sports portal.

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Did you know...

...that an allumwandlung is a form of chess problem of which the full solution involves, as, the promotion of a pawn or pawns to a knight, bishop, rook, and queen?
...that neither Ukraine, which won the open division, nor China, which won the women's division, medalled in the overall title calculation at the 36th Chess Olympiad after the former's women's team and the latter's open team finished 18th and 24th respectively?
...that the Sokolsky Opening, an irregular opening in which white advances his queen's knight's pawn two squares on his first move (1. b4) is sometimes known as the Orangutan Opening because it was the opening move "suggested" by an orangutan to Polish Grandmaster Savielly Tartakower (pictured) during the latter's 1924 visit to the Bronx Zoo?
...that Georgian Grandmaster and thirteen-year women's world champion Maia Chiburdanidze has been commemorated on multiple postage stamps, including one issued by Mongolia in 1986 to depict a position from her 1984 world championship match with Russian Woman Grandmaster Irina Levitina?
...that the 1874 varsity match between the Oxford University Chess Club, the oldest university chess club in the United Kingdom, and the club of the University of Cambridge was attended by many prominent London chess masters, including future world chess champion Austrian Wilhelm Steinitz, who served as arbiter?
...that, after he was discovered to have used the HIARCS computer chess engine, accessed via a Bluetooth-enabled device situated in his cap, to aid his play at the 2006 Subroto Mukerjee Memorial, Indian Umakant Sharma was banned from competitive chess for ten years by the All India Chess Federation in what is the longest suspension recorded to have been leveled for cheating in chess?

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Quotations

In complicated positions, Bobby Fischer hardly had to be afraid of anybody. — Estonian Grandmaster Paul Keres, on the middlegame calculation prowess of American Grandmaster and world champion Bobby Fischer (pictured)
Chess is in its essence a game, in its form an art, and in its execution a science. — German chess theoretician, historian, and master Tassilo von Heydebrand und der Lasa, on the multiple natures of chess
Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where kings don't expect them to be. — English author Terry Pratchett, in his 1992 novel Small Gods
Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make people happy. — German chess theoretician and master Siegbert Tarrasch, on the capacity of chess to inspire and delight
Combinations have always been the most intriguing aspect of chess. The masters look for them, the public applauds them, the critics praise them. It is because combinations are possible that chess is more than a lifeless mathematical exercise. They are the poetry of the game; they are to chess what melody is to music. They represent the triumph of mind over matter. — American Grandmaster and psychology author Reuben Fine
Chess makes man wiser and clear-sighted. — Russian President Vladimir Putin