Curiosities in chess

The game of chess can be funny, sad, serious and joyful. There are stories told between chess players about how to score a draw from obviously lost the game. This situation happened several times in the history of chess. An older man with the white chess pieces is losing and he is in clear disadvantage; the clock is ticking. He seems to be asleep, but he actually died. What will happen in the chess game? The opponent of course offers a draw. It is a bit of a black humor, however, let's see other chess curiosities and interesting things not only from the chess history.

The longest chess game

If we look at the number of moves, the longest chess game took place in Belgrade in 1989 between I. Nikolic and G. Arsovic. The game lasted for more than 20 hours and players played 269 moves. The result of this game was a draw. After this game, the FIDE organization altered the rules in a way, that if a player does not move with a pawn or capture a piece, the game ends with a draw after fifty moves.

The shortest chess game

If we exclude forfeited games and agreed draws, we will again head to the former Yugoslavie, where in the match between Dordevic - Kovacevic from 1984 after 6 turns the white gave up ((1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5 c6 3.e3?? Qa5 taking a bishop). It may look a lot like an amateur game, but it really happened).

Latest first capture

An unprecedented thing happened in the 1969 junior world championship. In this game, the first figure (pawn) was taken in the 94th turn. Incredible! In 1994 there was even a game where no one captured a piece and the black had to give up after 31 turns because he was threatened with an unavoidable checkmate. It was in the game between Nuber - Keckeisen.

The longest time without losing

World Champion José Raúl Capablanca has not lost a single game for 8 years in a row. It happened at the peak of his career between the years 1916-1924. The highest number of games without losing holds Michail Tal, the Latvian chess Grandmaster who has a series of 95 games without losing (46 wins and 49 draws).

The highest ELO rating

The highest ELO rating was achieved in 2013 by the current world champion Magnus Carlsen. His ELO rating was 2872 points. If we want to talk about the most significant ELO dominance, it was Bobby Fischer who has the advantage of 125 points above Boris Spassky (Fischer 2785, Spassky 2660).

There are many other chess curiosities - for example correspondence chess or a chess battle between human brain and artificial inteligence. We will soon write article about that.

2020-07-15 by Lubomir


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