Chess facts and history

• Researchers think chess may have originated in India as a war game, chatarung, dating to as early as A.D. 600.

• The piece that is now the queen originally was the king’s adviser. Europeans changed it to a queen, and it became the strongest piece on the board in the 1400s.

• Benjamin Franklin was a chess fanatic and wrote “The Morals of Chess” in 1750.

• America’s first chess champion was Paul Morphy, who won the American Chess Congress tournament in 1857.

• Membership for the nation’s overseer of chess competition, the U.S. Chess Federation, doubled when Bobby Fischer emerged in 1957 as the youngest U.S. champion at age 14. (Fischer at one point lived in Arizona but grew up in New York.)

Source: http://www.azcentral.com

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Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
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