HISTORY OF CHESS

CHESS IS A board game and mental sport for two players. It is played on a square board of 8 rows (called ranks) and 8 columns (called files), giving 64 squares of alternating colour, light and dark, with each player having a light square at his bottom right when facing the board.

Each player begins the game with 16 pieces that each move and capture other pieces on the board in a unique way: eight pawns, two knights, two bishops, two rooks, one queen and one king.

DO YOU KNOW

Blitz chess, a version of chess make use of a chess clock to limit the time control for each player.
Generally each side has three to fifteen minutes (five is common) for all of its moves.	An even faster version of chess is known as bullet chess or lightning chess.
Bullet chess's time controls are less than three minutes.	Speed chess requires the player to spend less time thinking because if the player's time runs out, he loses.

HISTORY OF CHESS

HISTORY OF CHESS

• Common view is that chess originated in India, since the Arabic, Persian, Greek, Portuguese and Spanish words for chess are all derived from the Sanskrit game Chaturanga. Moreover, in the past only India had all three animals, horse, camel and elephant, in its cavalry, which represent knight, bishop and rook in chess.
• One theory also says that chess arose from the similar game of Xiangqi (Chinese chess), or at least a predecessor thereof, existing in China since the 2nd century BC.
• Chess slowly spread westward to Europe and eastward as far as Japan.
• When chess entered the Muslim world, the names of its pieces retained their Persian forms but its name became shatranj that continued in Spanish as ajedrez and in Greek as zatrikion, but in most of Europe it was replaced by versions of the Persian word shah = "king".
• Reached Russia via Mongolia, where it was played at the beginning of the 7th century.
• Introduced into the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors in the 10th century.
• Its entrance into Europe is marked by changes to the rules, including changes to the moves of the bishops, pawns and queen, with the modern form emerging in the 19th century.

FIDE tournament categories

FIDE classifies tournaments into categories according to the average rating of the players. Each category is 25 rating points wide. Category 1 is for an average rating of 2251 to 2275, category 2 is 2276 to 2300, etc. The highest rated tournaments have been Category 21, with an average from 2751 to 2775. The top categories are as follows:

Category	Meaning
15	Average rating is in range 2601 to 2625
16	Average rating is in range 2626 to 2650
17	Average rating is in range 2651 to 2675
18	Average rating is in range 2676 to 2700
19	Average rating is in range 2701 to 2725
20	Average rating is in range 2726 to 2750
21	Average rating is in range 2751 to 2775