Best match record: William Steinitz played 27 chess matches between 1862 and 1896. He won 25 of the 27 matches with a record of 160 wins, 70 losses, and 57 draws.

Highest Elo rating: In the Jul 99 and the Jan 00 FIDE rating list, Garry Kasparov’s rating was 2851. On the women’s FIDE list in Jul 05 and the Oct 05, my sister Judit’s rating was 2735.

Highest per capita chess population: Iceland has the highest per capita chess population on the planet.

Highest per capita chess grandmasters: Beersheva, Israel, has the highest percentage of GMs per capita of any city in the world.

Largest public chess library: The largest public library for chess is the J.G. White Collection at the Cleveland Public Library. The library carries over 32,000 chess books and over 6,000 volumes of bound chess periodicals.

Largest personal chess library: The largest private chess library belongs to GM Lothar Schmid. He has over 20,000 chess books.

Largest Chess Olympiad: The 35th Bled Chess Olympiad in 2002 had 136 men’s teams and 92 women’s teams.

Longest World Chess Champion: Emanuel Lasker was the World Chess Champion for almost 27 years (26 years and 337 days to be exact).

Most chess moves in a single game: The longest chess game is 269 moves between Ivan Nikolic vs. Goran Arsovic. The game was played in Belgrade in 1989 and ended in a draw which took over 20 hours.

Most single game chess moves in a World Championship: The longest World Championship game lasted 124 moves between Korchnoi and Karpov which ended in a stalemate. This was their 5th game in the 1978 match in Merano, Italy.

Can you add more chess records to this list?

Rusty Miller just sent me this:

The NORTHWEST CHESS magazine of which the Jan 2008 issue is number 715. The publication started in Oct 1947 as WASHINGTON CHESS LETTER, and later was called NORTHWEST CHESS LETTER and then just NORTHWEST CHESS. It comes out monthly and has every month since the start. Very few US publications are or have been monthly ones. It is the joint publication of the Washington Chess Federation and the Oregon Chess Federation and has been for most of it’s life.

Thanks Rusty!

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Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
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