The History of Chess: The Dramatic Rise of the World’s Most Popular Board Game

On the afternoon of May 11, 1997, in a television studio on the 34th floor of a building in midtown Manhattan, one of the strongest chess players in history sat down to play the sixth and final game of a match he had expected to win. Garry Kasparov was 34 and had held the world championship for 12 years, making his name a synonym for the human mind operating at the absolute edge of its power. Across the board from him sat an opponent with no mind at all.

The opponent was a black tower of processors built by IBM and named Deep Blue. It did not sit, because it could not sit - it was represented at the board by a quiet engineer who moved the pieces on its behalf. It calculated roughly 200 million positions per second and could not grow tired across a long session. 

It is tempting to treat that afternoon as the climax of chess history, the moment the game arrived at its final destination. But perhaps it is better understood as a single frame in a far longer film, one that began roughly 15 centuries earlier and half a world away, on the plains of northern India, where the game did not yet carry a name recognizable to modern societies and the pieces stood not for bishops, queens, and rooks, but for elephants, chariots, and foot soldiers.

The history of chess is, in a true sense, a history of globalization. No other game has crossed so many borders, come in so many variations, or worn so many costumes. It was carried out of India by merchants and diplomats, adopted by the Persian nobility, reshaped by the scholars of Islam, smuggled into Christian Europe along three separate roads, denounced from the pulpit and then preached from it, transformed in a single Spanish generation into something fast and dangerous, refined into a science by a stubborn theorist in the 19th century, made into a political and propagandist instrument of state by the Soviet Union, and at last carried into the circuitry of a machine that beat the best.