The game of chess can be funny, sad, serious and joyful. There are stories told between chess players about how to score a draw from obviously lost the game. This situation happened several times in the history of chess. An older man with the white chess pieces is losing and he is in clear disadvantage; the clock is ticking. He seems to be asleep, but he actually died. What will happen in the chess game? The opponent of course offers a draw. It is a bit of a black humor, however, let's see other chess curiosities and interesting things not only from the chess history.
If we look at the number of moves, the longest chess game took place in Belgrade in 1989 between I. Nikolic and G. Arsovic. The game lasted for more than 20 hours and players played 269 moves. The result of this game was a draw. After this game, the FIDE organization altered the rules in a way, that if a player does not move with a pawn or capture a piece, the game ends with a draw after fifty moves.
If we exclude forfeited games and agreed draws, we will again head to the former Yugoslavie, where in the match between Dordevic - Kovacevic from 1984 after 6 turns the white gave up ((1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5 c6 3.e3?? Qa5 taking a bishop). It may look a lot like an amateur game, but it really happened).
An unprecedented thing happened in the 1969 junior world championship. In this game, the first figure (pawn) was taken in the 94th turn. Incredible! In 1994 there was even a game where no one captured a piece and the black had to give up after 31 turns because he was threatened with an unavoidable checkmate. It was in the game between Nuber - Keckeisen.
World Champion José Raúl Capablanca has not lost a single game for 8 years in a row. It happened at the peak of his career between the years 1916-1924. The highest number of games without losing holds Michail Tal, the Latvian chess Grandmaster who has a series of 95 games without losing (46 wins and 49 draws).
The highest ELO rating was achieved in 2013 by the current world champion Magnus Carlsen. His ELO rating was 2872 points. If we want to talk about the most significant ELO dominance, it was Bobby Fischer who has the advantage of 125 points above Boris Spassky (Fischer 2785, Spassky 2660).
There are many other chess curiosities - for example correspondence chess or a chess battle between human brain and artificial inteligence. We will soon write article about that.
2020-07-15 by Lubomir
Single elimination tournaments are a popular format for many sports and games, where the loser of each match is immediately e…
Double elimination bracket tournaments are a common format for many sports and games where the loser of each match is not imm…
The Swiss pairing system is a non-eliminating tournament format that features a fixed number of rounds of competition, but co…
Important aspect of organising multiple tournaments is a possibility to link all the tournaments together. Create the organi…
Tournaments are played according to different tournament systems. However, almost in every system happens, that some of the p…
The selection of the best chess players of all time is not entirely objective and it is not possible to compare players from …
The game of chess can be funny, sad, serious and joyful. There are stories told between chess players about how to score a dr…
Chess tournaments are played around the world. For example, the first official tournament took place in London in 1851, other…
The game of chess is quite undemanding. Organizing a chess tournament does not have to be too hard. The difficulty of organiz…
The Swiss system has been used for a long time in chess and it is widespread in tournaments with more players (such as the Ch…