Chess, Mate?

13 THINGS

- BY Michael Goodman

GAME ON! About 1 in 5 Americans play chess at least occasionally. The site chess.com hosts some 30 million matches every day and offers tips to help players at all levels improve. More than 600 million adults play worldwide.

HISTORICALLY, RUSSIA (or the Soviet Union) has had many of the world's strongest chess players. From 1927 to 1990, only two World Championships weren't won by a Soviet, and in a 1970 competition popularly known as USSR vs. the Rest of the World, the USSR won. But things are evening out. The current world champion, Gukesh Dommaraju, is Indian, and Magnus Carlsen of Norway has been the highest-rated player during the last decade. Six of the current top 20 players in the world are American.

But among top players, checkmate is rare since they can see far enough ahead to know when they are going to lose, at which point they usually resign. Players earn ratings based on their performance in tournaments. Typical club players have 1300 to 1500 rating points. Those rated higher than 2200 are masters, and most grandmasters have more than 2500 rating points.

CERTAIN SERIES of moves moves are named for the places where they were first played or popularized: the Vienna Game, the Danish Gambit, the London System, the Sicilian Defense and the Yugoslav Attack, among others. But the Queen’s Gambit has nothing to do with Queens, New York. The name comes from the tactic itself, in which a player purposefully sacrifices a pawn on the queen’s side.