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Chess Pieces facts

While investigating facts about Chess Pieces Names and Chess Pieces Moves, I found out little known, but curios details like:

First game of chess against a computer was played in 1952 by Alan Turing. Because there were no computers powerful enough to actually run the program Alan Turing "ran" the program manually on a piece of paper

how chess pieces move?

About Chess960 - a game created by Bobby Fischer which uses the same board and pieces of regular chess, but randomly shuffles the home row to prevent players from relying on memorized strategies and instead rely on their own creativity

What chess pieces can jump?

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what chess pieces can take the king. Here are 47 of the best facts about Chess Pieces Crossword and Chess Pieces Crossword Clue I managed to collect.

what chess pieces do?

  1. One of the oldest chess strategy books, from 1561, recommends playing with your back to the sun to blind your opponent. If playing at night by a fire, it advises you to cast a shadow over the board with your hand, so your opponent "will not be able to see where to play his pieces."

  2. Before 1600, a game of chess could be won by capturing all of the opponent's pieces, leaving a bare king; a style of play known as "annihilation". In Medieval times, players considered it nobler to win by checkmate, so annihilation became a half win for a while, until it was abandoned.

  3. In chess, the queen used to be a relatively weak piece that reflected moral inferiority; that changed around 1500 with the rise of Queen Isabella of Spain.

  4. About a variant of chess called Dunsany's, or Horde chess in which one player's pieces are set up identical to regular chess, while the other player starts with a horde of 32 pawns.

  5. There is a game called Tamerlane chess which is similar to chess, with a different board, and includes elephants, camels, generals, war machines, 11 types of pawns, and several other pieces.

  6. There’s a version of chess called "quantum chess" where the pieces are in a state of superposition; the player doesn't know what a piece will be until it is selected for play. Once selected, it behaves as any one of the conventional pieces and returns to its state of superposition after the move

  7. Ray Charles, not only played the piano blind, but was also a keen chess player. His white and black squares had different elevation, and the pieces were shaped differently depending on the color.

  8. Due to a loophole in official chess rules it used to be possible to promote your pawn into an enemy piece. In one chess puzzle the winning move for White is to promote its pawn into a black knight.

  9. Surrealist/Dadaist master Marcel Duchamp quit the art world, moved to Argentina, carved his own chess pieces and devoted the rest of his life to playing chess.

  10. Magnus Carlsen is possibly the best chess player in history, he remembers over 10,000 of his past games and can play against 10 people simultaneously without looking at the boards, just remembering where all the pieces are in his minds eye

chess pieces facts
What chess pieces move where?

Chess Pieces data charts

For your convenience take a look at Chess Pieces figures with stats and charts presented as graphic.

chess pieces fact data chart about Minimum number of moves to reach each square by a chess piec
Minimum number of moves to reach each square by a chess piece

chess pieces fact data chart about Comparison of captured pieces across 275,000 games of chess
Comparison of captured pieces across 275,000 games of chess

Why chess pieces is important?

You can easily fact check why are chess pieces black and white by examining the linked well-known sources.

Marcel Duchamp, renown artist and chess enthusiast, relentlessly studied chess problems during his honey moon to the point that his wife glued the pieces to the board in the middle of the night in retaliation. They were divorced 3 months later.

Non-standard chess pieces are called “fairy chess pieces” and pretty much every type of movement has been classified and given a name - source

The names of pieces in Chess have changed over time. Queens were viziers or advisors, bishops were elephants, and rooks were chariots. - source

Kriegspiel is a variant of chess where players play blindly (players can see their own pieces but not the opponents).

The most expensive chess set in the world is valued at over 9.8 million dollars. One king piece alone weighs 165.2 grams of 18 carat yellow gold and has a spiraling mid-section graced by 73 rubies and 146 diamonds. - source

Stage in chess when few pieces remain?

White wood of yaupon is used for production of white pieces used in chess.

How chess pieces move pdf?

Boxwood has strong wood that can be used for carving and manufacture of chess pieces, decorative boxes, wooden spoons and various pieces (tailpieces, tuning pegs...) for the stringed instruments.

The surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp was so devoted to chess that, after he stayed up all night studying one game, his first wife glued the pieces to the chessboard.

The word for the chess piece 'rook' is derived from the Persian for 'chariot', which is why they can move long distances even though they're now depicted as castles.

12th-century chess pieces carved from walrus tusks and whale teeth inspired the chess set in Harry Potter and are the most impressive Norse objects ever found in Britain. They were discovered on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland but were probably made in Norway, and are full of Viking imagery

Chess pieces have different titles in other languages. Alternative names for the bishop include: tortoise, camel, elephant, shooter, hunter, runner, and jester.

Chess pieces infographics

Beautiful visual representation of Chess Pieces numbers and stats to get perspecive of the whole story.

chess pieces fact infographic about Most frequent paths of chess pieces giving mate

Most frequent paths of chess pieces giving mate


chess pieces fact infographic about Analysis of the most frequently moved-to positions for each

Analysis of the most frequently moved-to positions for each chess piece.


Stage in chess when only a few pieces remain?

Whenever Marlon Brando lost a game of chess, he'd knock all the pieces off the board and declare, "I'm bored."

In 1475, Queen Isabella was crowned, the queen chess piece became female, and could only one square at a time, like the King. In 1495, when Isabella was the most powerful woman in Europe, that the present rules of chess were established, in which the Queen moves in all directions on the board.

There is a chess variant called "Singularity Chess", played on a board distorted in the centre. Due to the distortion, some pieces can make U-turns, attack the same square multiple ways, and bishops can possibly change square colours.

Cuban chess player Capablanca (who was world chess champion from 1921 to 1927) proposed a new chess with two new pieces:

Heartwood of ebony tree is black or brownish (chocolate brown) in color. It is used for the manufacture of black chess pieces, inlay, tool handles, canoes, violins and black keys for the piano. Gabon ebony was used as firewood in the past. This practice is abandoned today because ebony is very expensive and rare in the wild.

How chess pieces are sold crossword?

German has a word for to describe a situation in chess where a player would prefer not moving at all when it's his turn, because moving any piece would worsen his current position. A player who is forced to make a move in this situation is said to be "in zugzwang."

Taikyoku Shogi is an old chess-like board game played on a 1296-square board with 402 pieces per side, with each side owning pieces like the Drunk Elephant, Strutting Crow, Enchanted Badger, Playful Cockatoo, Free Pig, and Violent Wind.

A Taikyoku shogi, a novelty variant of Japanese chess, played on a 36x36 board, with more than 200 kinds of pieces

The Noble Collection recreated the wizard chess set from Harry Potter with incredible detail. All 32 chess pieces made of resin perfectly match those in the movie, though without the motion that knocks them off the board in the movie

The game Stratego has its roots in China. It is partly based on the early 20th Century game L'Attaque which in turn is based on Chinese Jungle chess (Duo shou qi) and Army Chess (Lu Zhan Jun Qi).These games have similarities; ranked pieces, special movement, etc. Even the board looks alike.

In 2012 a supercomputer named Lomonosov had solved chess for every position with up to seven pieces (including the two kings)

Shatranj, an ancient predecessor of chess which was very similar, except for the ways in which the pieces moved, and the fact that Bishops were War Elephants.

The "en passant": a special pawn capture move in chess. It is the only move where a captured piece is not replaced on the same square by the capturing piece.

Ajeeb was a chess-playing "automaton", created by Charles Hooper in 1868. A particularly intriguing piece of faux mechanical technology (while presented as entirely automated, it in fact concealed a strong human chess player inside), it drew scores of thousands of spectators to its games

In Chess, white's first turn advantage can be offset by removing specific pieces.

After World War II , the occupational government of Japan (SCAP) attempted to ban Shogi, Japanese Chess, because SCAP believed the 'captured' pieces could lead to the idea of prisoner abuse

While playing a 3-minute blitz game of chess at the 2019 World Championships, GM Magnus Carlsen wasted 20 seconds of his time taking his suit coat off, drinking water, and organizing his chess pieces.

There's a variant of chess called Losing Chess, where the object of the game is to either have all your pieces get captured, or get stalemated.

During WW2, the Japanese would play chess using POWs as chess pieces where the prisoners would be beheaded on the spot if they were captured.

Even though a chess grandmaster can perfectly rearrange a midgame chessboard after seeing it for only 3 seconds, they can't do the same when the pieces are placed at random. They rely on a process called "chunking" (pattern recognition) vs common perception that they have photographic memories.

This is our collection of basic interesting facts about Chess Pieces. The fact lists are intended for research in school, for college students or just to feed your brain with new realities. Possible use cases are in quizzes, differences, riddles, homework facts legend, cover facts, and many more. Whatever your case, learn the truth of the matter why is Chess Pieces so important!

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