Raymond Keene

I first met Sir Jeremy Hanley, who has died at the age of 80, in Jersey in 1971. He was part of a cohort of my oppone...

The fourteenth edition of Norway Chess unfolded from 25 May to 5 June 2026, marking a significant new departure in th...

The Westminster Alice is the name of a collection of vignettes written by Hector Hugh Munro (better known by his pseu...

With the death of Jimmy Adams at the age of 81, the chess world has lost one of its most devoted custodians. He was a...

There is a tendency to suppose that chess has always been played with the same pieces upon the same board. This is not so. In various ancient forms of chess some quite exotic pieces made their appearance. In the Great Chess of Alfonso the Wise of Spain, and in the extended version of the game favoured by the world conqueror Tamburlaine, the ordinary menagerie of chess was enlarged. We are familiar with the horse that represents the knight, but ambitious potentates in the Iberian Peninsula and on the Asian mainland were not content with such conventional restrictions. The rhinoceros, crocodile, camel and giraffe were among the creatures introduced by these chess-loving rulers, who naturally preferred to play on boards considerably larger than the standard sixty-four squares.

There is something peculiarly tragic about a man who conquers everything except the temptation to cease conquering. Alert readers will already know that Magnus Carlsen has now enrolled himself amongst that melancholy fraternity of giants—Morphy, Alekhine and Fischer—who departed from the high throne before the final summons had been answered. While still wearing the coveted halo and laurels of World Chess Champion, Magnus Carlsen publicly announced that he would not defend his title in 2023. FIDÉ, the world governing body, accepted that this was no passing whim but an irrevocable judgment, for Carlsen had for years displayed little inclination to return to the arena that ought to remain the supreme theatre of chess.

The emergence of prodigious chess talent has always exerted a peculiar fascination. From Capablanca's youthful brilliance to the meteoric ascents of Fischer, Kasparov and Carlsen, every generation produces a handful of players whose progress appears to compress years of learning into mere months. The latest name to command worldwide attention is the 12-year-oldArgentinian wunderkind Faustino Oro.

Chess is one of the world's oldest games of war: a battlefield upon which armies fight without bloodshed, and where the victory belongs not to the strongest arm but to the most disciplined mind. It shares an antiquity with the Chinese encirclement game of Go, Chinese chess (Xiangqi), and the Japanese game of Shogi. Yet chess is generally said to have developed not in China or Japan, but in northern India at some period before 500 AD. Some experts, however, place its origins much further back, in Mohenjo-Daro of the Harappan civilisation, in what is now Pakistan, thousands of years BCE.

Member ratings World Chess Day on 20 July has become an increasingly important occasion in the international chess calendar, offering an

A curious contribution to the obfuscation of chess tradition and history appears in the current August issue of