Chess, one of the oldest and most popular board games, played by two opponents on a checkered board with

specially designed pieces of contrasting colours, commonly white and black. White moves first, after which the players
alternate turns in accordance with fixed rules, each player attempting to force the opponent’s principal piece, the King,
into checkmate—a position where it is unable to avoid capture.
Chess first appeared in India about the 6th century AD and by the 10th century had spread from Asia to
the Middle East and Europe. Since at least the 15th century, chess has been known as the “royal game” because of its
popularity among the nobility. Rules and set design slowly evolved until both reached today’s standard in the early 19th
century. Once an intellectual diversion favoured by the upper classes, chess went through an explosive growth in interest
during the 20th century as professional and state-sponsored players competed for an officially recognized world
championship title and increasingly lucrative tournament prizes. Organized chess tournaments, postal correspondence
games, and Internet chess now attract men, women, and children around the world.

Characteristics of The Game

Chess is played on a board of 64 squares arranged in eight vertical rows called files and eight horizontal rows
called ranks. These squares alternate between two colours: one light, such as white, beige, or yellow; and the other dark,
such as black or green. The board is set between the two opponents so that each player has a light-coloured square at the
right-hand corner.

History of the Game Chess

Chess can tell you a great deal about the way people lived in medieval times. If you look at the way a chessboard is set up
and study the pieces and how they are used, you will realize that chess is a
miniature history of medieval times. The six different chess pieces on the board represent a cross section of medieval life
with its many ceremonies, grandeur and wars.

Chess was played many centuries ago in China, India and Persia, but theories vary about its specific country of origin.
Through a series of invasions, chess quickly spread throughout all of Europe. Europeans gave chess pieces the names we
know today, to reflect the way they lived. The names represent the way in which both ordinary people and persons of rank
lived their lives.

The pawns on the chessboard represent serfs, or laborers. There are more of them than any other piece on the
board, and often they are sacrificed to save the more valuable pieces. In medieval times, serfs were considered
no more than property of landowners, or chattel. Life was brutally hard for serfs during this era of history.
They worked hard and died young. They were often left unprotected while wars raged around them. They
could
be traded, used as a diversion, or even sacrificed to allow landowners to escape harm.

The castle piece on a chessboard is the home, or the refuge, just as it was a home in medieval times. In chess,
each side has two castles, or rooks as they are sometimes called. The knight on a chessboard represents the
professional soldier of medieval times, whose job it was to protect persons of rank, and there are two of them
per each side in a game of chess.
Knights in chess are more important than pawns but less important than bishops, kings, or queens. Their
purpose in the game of chess is to protect the more important pieces, and they can be sacrificed
to save those pieces just as pawns can. There is a bishop in the game of chess, who represents the
church. The church was a rich and mighty force in medieval times, and religion played a large part
in daily life. It is no wonder that a figure that represented the concept of religion found its way into
the game. A bishop was the title for a priest in the Catholic Church who had risen through the ranks
to a more powerful position. In the game of chess, there are two bishops on each side.
 The queen is the only piece on the board during a chess game that represents a woman, and she is the most
powerful piece of the game. In chess, there is only one queen on each side. Many people do not realize that
queens in medieval times often held a powerful, yet precarious, position. The king was often guided by her
advice, and in many cases the queen
played games of intrigue at court.
Kings, however, could set their wives aside or even imprison them in nunneries with the approval of the church (and
without the queen’s approval), and many women schemed merely to hold their place at court. The machinations of queens
working either for or against their kings are well noted in history throughout medieval times, and the queen
often held more power than the king did.

The king is the tallest piece on the board, and is as well defended on the chessboard as in medieval life. In
medieval times, the surrender of the king would mean the loss of the kingdom to invading armies and that
could mean change for the worse. It was to everyone’s advantage, from the lowest serf to the highest-ranking
official, to keep the king safe from harm. The king is the most important, but not the most powerful piece in
chess. If you do not protect your king, you lose the game.

Rules and Regulations of the Game

1. Touching Chess Pieces
Midsection Of Man Playing On Chess
If you touch a piece on the chess board, you must move it. This is known as the touch-move rule and is often a source of
difficulty for players new to tournaments. It also requires you to capture an opponent’s piece if you touch it. This rule only
applies if you can make a legal move with the piece you touched.

There are some exceptions. If you accidentally brush a piece, you are not required to move it. If a piece is awkwardly
placed, you can adjust it; simply say “I adjust” before touching the piece to make it clear to your opponent that you don’t
intend to move it.

2. Ask Tournament Directors for Clarifications

Never hesitate to ask a tournament director (TD) to clarify any confusion you may have about the rules. If you and an
opponent have a disagreement, stop the clocks, find a director, and ask them to make a ruling. It's important to settle any
questions or disputes as soon as they occur.

3. Recording Chess Moves

Most tournaments require players to record their moves. This helps provide evidence of what has occurred during the
game in case of a dispute. In order to record your game, you will need to learn how to read and write chess notation.

4. Interrupting a Chess Game in Progress

In a word: Don't. In most chess tournaments, you’ll be able to walk around the playing area and watch other games,
provided you do so quietly. Observers are forbidden from telling players anything about their games, even if they notice a
violation of the rules.

5. Cell Phone Use During Chess Games

This is another faux pas to avoid when your part of a chess tournament. In recent years, new rules have been written to
deal with loud phones, which can break the concentration of chess players. If your phone rings in the playing area, you
will likely be subject to a penalty, and may even have to forfeit your game.

6. Using a Chess Clock

Tournament chess is played with time limits, which vary by event. Time is kept by using a chess clock. Using these clocks
can be distracting at first, but will soon become second nature. Most importantly, remember to hit your clock after each
move you make – this stops your clock and starts your opponent’s time. Also, be sure to use the same hand to move your
pieces and touch the clock.

7. Recording the Final Results of a Chess Game

Win, lose, or draw, both players are required to make sure the proper result is recorded. If you’re not sure where to mark
down your result, ask a director for help.

Scoring of the Game

In most chess tournaments held since the middle of the 19th century, there has been a very simple scoring system
used. Players who scored a win in a game were awarded a point, while those scoring  draws were given a half-point.
Losing a game, as you might expect, was worth zero points.
There were, and continue to be, many good reasons why this system became the standard in tournament play. First, there’s
a certain logic to the “zero-sum” nature of the scoring. Every game is worth exactly one point, and (barring unusual
circumstances such as double forfeits) the players will also find a way to split that point amongst them. It’s very simple
for fans to keep track of, and while a score can’t always tell you at a glance how many games a player has won or lost, it
can at least tell you if the player has more wins or losses. For instance, a player with a 4/7 score can also have their score
expressed as 4-3, or +1, which tells us that they won one more game than they lost during the tournament.

Another argument in favor of this scoring system in modern chess is that the ratings system is based on the idea
that a draw is half as valuable as a win. If scoring systems are changed to incentivize wins over draws, players may play in
ways that are successful in tournaments, but which hurt them in the ratings, making those ratings less accurate.

3-1-0 Scoring
Recently, some tournaments have moved to a 3-1-0 scoring format. This format has also been called Football
Scoring, thanks to the fact that it has widely been adopted in soccer leagues around the world.
In this system, players are given an added incentive to win games. Each win is worth three points, while a draw is only
worth one, and losses are still worth zero. The major difference in this scoring system is that players who score a win and
a loss are ranked above those who have scored two draws (three points vs. two), so fighting play is encouraged.

Many organizers have used such a scoring system as a way to discourage draws in tournament play, arguably with
some level of success. Since a player must only win more than one-third of their decisive games to do better than drawing
every game, many risky moves are actually correct to play, even if the outcome is unclear.

One interesting consequence of this scoring system is that it is possible for a player who would have finished
behind someone under traditional scoring to finish above them under the 3-1-0 system. While both systems are essentially
arbitrary, these results still seem “incorrect” to many players, as the traditional scoring system has become deeply
ingrained in the culture of chess. A more convincing concern is the potential for collusion when such a system is used in
double round-robin events, as friendly players could do better by “trading wins” rather than simply drawing two games
against each other.
Other Scoring Systems
From time to time, organizers have tried more radical approaches to changing the scoring system in order to liven up
their events. One notable effort in recent years was the Ballard Antidraw Point System, better known as BAPS. The
scoring system was the brainchild of Clint Ballard, a chess organizer in Washington who was looking for a way to ensure
that players wouldn’t want to draw their games. His answer was BAPS, which scored games as follows:
 Black Wins: 3 Points
 White Wins: 2 Points
 Draws: 1 point for Black, 0 points for White
 Losses: 0 Points

Given the slight disadvantage for Black, the second player is consistently given more points for the same result as
White. However, White has a second disadvantage: they do not receive any points whatsoever for a draw. This makes a
draw no better than a loss for White. The scoring system was most prominently used in a “Slugfest” tournament organized
by Ballard back in 2005 but was not otherwise widely used.