History TabletopGame / Chess

Though the modern game has long been dominated by players from the former USSR, and while there are still many strong players from Russia, there is (as of 2020) a wide variety of nationalities among the world's top players. At present, the current World Champion is Norwegian Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, who also has the highest Elo rating in history. But note that 2005 was the last year ''any'' human was able to beat the best chess-playing computer in the world.

* SchmuckBait: Why the Scholar's Mate works so well against novices. They'll go for the seemingly exposed queen with their knight without thinking... and completely overlook the ensuing checkmate.

Chess is a TurnBasedStrategy tabletop board game, and is one of the most influential games in history. It is OlderThanFeudalism at the ''very'' least; it has more [[SeriousBusiness scholarship and study]] devoted to it than any other game, with only TabletopGame/{{Go}} coming close; it contains more possible directions for a match to go than there are atoms in the entire universe; [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking and it has]] [[Music/Chess1984 a play]] named after it.

* ChangingGameplayPriorities: In the opening and middlegame, it's important to keep you king protected, to avoid being checkmated. However, in the endgame, when there aren't enough pieces left to checkmate, it's important to get the king active, to chase down enemy pawns/support the advance of one's own pawns.

* ChangingGameplayPriorities: In the opening and middlegame, it's important to keep you kind protected, to avoid being checkmated. However, in the endgame, when there aren't enough pieces left to checkmate, it's important to get the king active, to chase down enemy pawns/support the advance of one's own pawns.

* GreyAndGrayMorality: Neither one of the sides is characterized as good or bad (or indeed given any characterization).

** Because the United States decided it needed its own set of Chess rules, players need a guide to compare the differences between [=FIDE=] and the US Chess Federation rules. The differences include very different rules regarding claiming draws or them being automatically drawn with no claim required, [=USCF=] having less types of illegal moves and being less punishing when they happen, [=USCF=] defaulting to players being allowed to arrive up to an hour late while [=FIDE=] rules default to no lateness allowed, [=FIDE=] disallowing any electronic devices on penalty of forfeit while [=USCF=] only needs them switched off and doesn't automatically forfeit a player if it happens to ring anyway, [=USCF=] allowing the proxy of an [[HouseRules upside down Rook]] to count as a Queen when a pawn is promoted while [=FIDE=] would force the arbiter to turn it back to the right way and have it play as a Rook. The biggest differences involved what counts as insufficient material when a game ends via timeout, [=USCF=] having a rule that allows castling after touching the rook first and not requiring moves to be made one handed except in blitz. Those differences created a storm in 2015 when Hikaru Nakamura's muscle memory caused a technical break in the [=FIDE=] rules by rook first, double handed castling, which is legal in America, in a [=FIDE=] rules Armageddon game vs Ian Nepomniachtchi.

* TheKingslayer: The one that does a checkmate.

* Mooks: The pawns.

* InstantWinCondition: If a king is put in a position of certain doom, the game ends, even if that king's team didn't lose a single piece the entire game.

* ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'':

[[AC:Film]]

* ThemedStockBoardGame: In addition to sets where the pieces appear as what they represent, with no backstory behind, there're others where they are modelled after characters of different franchises.

* EverythingExplodesEnding: Entirely possible in [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_chess atomic chess.]]

** The "Vertical Castling" loophole closure in [[SwitchOutMove castling]], as much as some people saw it as a GoodBadBug. Due to the wording of the FIDE rules where a promoted piece was considered to have 'not moved', it was possible to castle an unmoved King with the newly promoted Rook. It was such an obscure idea that no-one had played it in a serious game and it took until the early 1970's before anyone even wrote about it as a hypothetical. After an article in a major European chess magazine in 1972, FIDE decided to clarify the castling rule to only apply to the "same rank" as the King.
*** The loophole exists in early versions of the Fischer Random Chess (aka Chess 960) ruleset due to the same failure to include a restriction on which rank the castling has to be performed.

Related games include TabletopGame/{{Shatranj}}, TabletopGame/{{Xiangqi}}, TabletopGame/{{Makruk}}, and TabletopGame/{{Shogi}}.

Related games include TabletopGame/{{Shatranj}}, TabletopGame/{{Xiangqi}}, TabletopGame/{{Janggi}}, TabletopGame/{{Makruk}}, and TabletopGame/{{Shogi}}.

Related games include TabletopGame/{{Shatranj}}, TabletopGame/{{Xiangqi}}, TabletopGame/{{Janggi}}, TabletopGame/{{Makruk}}, TabletopGame/{{Sittuyin}}, and TabletopGame/{{Shogi}}.