History of Chess and free webinar videos

Nowadays, chess players are very much focused on their games – to improve their chess skills, reach the highest goals, increase their ratings, win tournaments and so on. But, as a chess player, it is also very important to know about ‘chess’ and how it originated.

That’s why, today, I’m going to provide you with a nice article – “The History of Chess”. Get ready, it’s time to relax a bit and READ about chess.  Please feel free to share this article with your friends, even those who don’t even play chess, as this is for EVERYONE.

CHESS – A GAME OF ROYALS

ORIGINS OF CHESS AND CHANGES THEREAFTER

According to chess historians, chess is one of the oldest games in existence; it originated around the 6th century AD.

In those times, The Indian Rajah (king) believed that war was the most effective school in which to learn the values of valour, decision-making, endurance,circumspection and bravery. Because of this, it is believed that war was chosen as the model for the game.

The most fascinating and frequently repeated story credits the invention of the game to the holy saint Sissa, at the courts of the Indian King Balhait. The King was disturbed by the prevalence of gambling and the addiction to games of pure luck.

Therefore, he summoned Sissa and requested the wise man to create a game that would require pure mental qualities of prudence, foresight, bravery, judgement,endurance, circumspection and analytical and reasoning ability, to oppose the teaching of games in which chance (luck) decided the outcome by the throw of a dice.

At some time thereafter, Sissa returned to the court of the King with a board(ashtapada) consisting of 8 x 8 = 64 squares, with rules not much different from the ones we use today. There were two armies of different colours, each consisting of 32 men, whose object was to capture or slay the king of theopposing army.

The ruler was so pleased that he gave the inventor the right to name his prize for the invention. The man, who was very clever, asked the King this: that for the first square of the chess board, he would receive one grain of wheat (or in some tellings, rice), two for the second one, four for the third one, and so forth,doubling the amount each time.

The sovereign, arithmetically unaware, quickly accepted the inventor’s offer, even getting a little offended by his perceived notion that the inventor was asking for such a low price, and ordered the treasurer to count and hand over the wheat to the inventor.

However, when the treasurer took more than a week to calculate the amount of wheat, the ruler asked him the reason for his tardiness. The treasurer then gave him the result of the calculation and explained that it would take more than all the assets of the kingdom put together to give the inventor his reward.

Let’s calculate the rice grains needed to fill a whole chess board is an 8×8 square, containing 64 squares. If the amount doubles on successive squares, then the sum of grains on all 64 squares is: 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 on the 64th square and atotal of 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 for the whole board.

That’s about 18 billion. So if a bag of rice contained a billion grains, you would need 18 billion such bags. Actually, a real bag of rice weighing 100 lbs has less than 3 million grains.

TO BE CONTINUED…..

I don’t wish to drag out the length of this article, so we’ll continue the rest of“Chess History” in the next part.

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