Chess did not really exist at all until the 18th century when Andre Philidor discovered pawns. For this he was pawnished. Earlier, the Bishop Ruy Lopez advocated placing the board so that the sun shined in your opponent's eyes. However, it was not clear whether he was referring to chess or the Spanish Inquisition. 

When the full game finally developed, Staunton decided there should be a World Champion, for which he gracefully volunteered. It is not sure whether Staunton ever really played chess, but it can be said he put forth certain designs in that set direction. 

Along came the American Paul Morphy, who developed the principle of moving a second piece before the first one was captured. Morphy set out to Europe to conquer the giants of the game only to find out at 5'5" he was the only one. He then challenged Staunton to a match, whereupon the latter decided that he was an eminent Shakespearean scholar. Paul then accused the Russians of fixing world chess and so decided to become a lawyer so that he could bar them from playing. However, as the Civil War approached, Paul joined the Southern craze and not much was heard from American chess for 10,000 years. 

Next among the giants was Adolf Anderssen, whose immortal game was promptly verified by Irving Chernev and Chess Review. 

Positional chess was founded by the next World Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, who found that by retreating all his pieces to the back rank, he could still induce his opponents to try and capture them. 

Steinitz was eventually defeated by Emmanuel Lasker, who used psychology to discover that if he made blunders his opponents would be so overjoyed that they would promptly make bigger ones. However, he could only keep this up for 27 years, and by then his opponents began to get wise. 

Three early non-World Champions should be mentioned: Dr. Siegbert Tarrasch, who assimilated the theories of Morphy, Steinitz, and Lasker into one big theory that enabled him to lose his World Championship match, Aron Nimzovitch, whose brilliant, eccentric, and original ideas placed him among the average grandmasters of his day, and Richard Reti, who found the theory of letting your opponent mess up his center first a very useful one. 

By then the new World Champion was the immortal, invincible, Jose Capablanca, who was crushed in his first title defense against a new challenger, Alexander Alekhine, aka Alex the Keen. Alex's games were so keen that everyone got lost in the complications, which he managed to slightly unravel ten years later in his immortal books, Modesty and Me: Alex Keen's Best Hindsight in Analysis 1907-1923 and How to Have Fun at Tournaments and Still Keep Your Composure 1924-1939. 

After Alex was gone, the International Chess Organization, F.I.D.O., set up a tournament with the objective of finding the best match player. 

Mikhail Botvinnik won, but then proved the F.I.D.O. system of finding a match champion through a tournament faulty. He did this by defending his title against four different opponents, and did not achieve a winning record in any of these four attempts. 

Ultimately Botvinnik was defeated by Tigran Petrosian, who adopted the philosophy of never losing - or winning, and thus was unable to win any tournaments. 

The unmovable force Petrosian was displaced by Boris Spassky, who then represented the East in the famous Spassky-Fischer match. His opponent, the mercurial American Bobby Fischer, represented the West and won the title, but now Spassky lives in the West and Fischer is not allowed there any more. 

Fischer proclaimed that he would be "The Playing World Champion", so he never played again. Therefore Anatoly Karpov became World Champion. Karpov professed to want to play Fischer, but somehow never got around to actually doing it. 

Meanwhile young Garry Kasparov changed his last name from Weinstein so that the Soviets might let him compete for the World Championship. Kasparov was losing the match to Karpov 5-3, found it stopped by F.I.D.O. Kasparov said he was winning because Karpov was only ahead 5-3. Karpov, from his hospital bed, protested that he felt fine and wanted to continue, but they were not letting him. Finally, in the rematch, Kasparov won, which caused not only the Soviet Union to break up, but also Kasparov from F.I.D.O. 

Now there are bantamweight (Khalifman), cruiserweight (Anand), and welterweight (Kramnik) World Champions, while Fischer, Karpov, and Kasparov all confidently say that they indeed should all be recognized as the rightful champion. Finally Shirov, who defeated Kramnik so that Kramnik could challenge Kasparov (don't ask), is suing F.I.D.O. and Kasparov for the right to play a World Championship match, even though Kasparov does not play in F.I.D.O. any more, and is not the non-F.I.D.O. World Champion (got that)? 

Then it became now, and all history stopped. 

Copyright 2000-2005 by Dan Heisman, all rights reserved.

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