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In November 1934, Lester Markel, the Sunday editor of The New York Times, wrote to Jose Raul Capablanca, a former world chess champion: ''Dear Mr. Capablanca: After full consideration of [...]

The classroom at Intermediate School 318 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was filled on Tuesday with the thumping and clattering of a half-dozen high-speed chess matches, played with a rambunctious energy more [...]

It is almost always better to be the aggressor in chess. Players who give their opponents time to plan and organize an attack often end up losing. But players who [...]

Chess is often a plot element in television dramas, but until ''Endgame'' premiered last year on the Canadian network Showcase, the game itself had never had a starring role. The [...]

The European Individual Chess Championship has become one of the strongest tournaments in the world, partly because the top finishers earn spots to the World Cup. But this year's event, [...]

Chess promoters have long searched for a way to make the game suitable for television. But there are two problems: it can be hard to understand, and it moves too [...]

The Great Recession may have officially ended in June 2009, but its effects continue to weigh on many aspects of consumers' financial lives. The economy has not fully regained its [...]

When it comes to cheating, chess might seem all but invulnerable. After all, the board and its pieces are out in the open for all to see. But an eruption [...]

Iceland has a rich chess tradition. The country has 12 grandmasters, which may be the largest number, per capita, in the world. And as host of the 1972 world title [...]

The European Women's Individual Chess Championship, which is being held in Gaziantep, Turkey, has set two precedents: its prize fund is larger than the one for this year's men's championship, [...]

Jay Bonin embodies what it means to live in service to Caissa, the mythical goddess of chess. Bonin, 56, is a New York international master who probably has played more [...]

The World Amateur Team Championships, held every year in four cities over Presidents' Day weekend, seem to be a rough barometer for how the economy is doing. In 2008, before [...]

CORRECTION APPENDED When Justin Sarkar, a soft-spoken and genial international master, was younger, he cut a distinctive figure at the chess board. He would sit slightly askew with his head [...]

Imagine if a university without a basketball program recruited Mike Krzyzewski, the legendary coach at Duke University, and not only managed to hire him but also persuaded most of his [...]

The world's three oldest grandmasters all celebrated birthdays this month: Yuri Averbakh was 90 on Wednesday; Svetozar Gligoric turned 89 on Feb. 2; and on Tuesday, Mark Taimanov was 86.Averbakh [...]

There was a changing of the guard at the top of the world rankings a few years ago, led by Magnus Carlsen, the current No. 1. But Judit Polgar's spot [...]

Is it possible to be No. 2 in the world and be overlooked? In some respects, that is the situation facing Levon Aronian, 29. Magnus Carlsen, 21, who is No. [...]

CORRECTION APPENDED The findings of a new study about mathematics may explain why there are so few women among the chess elite. It concluded that cultural factors, not biological ones, [...]

It is not surprising that California is a center of chess in the United States. But in the last couple of years, there has been a burst of activity there, [...]

The holiday season is always a busy one in the chess world. This year, two tournaments stood out by using new rules to make the competitions more exciting. The more [...]

Chess again crossed paths with politics in 2011, with the most remarkable moment occurring in Tripoli, Libya, during the NATO bombing campaign against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the World [...]

Traveling is part of the life of a chess player. Sometimes the destination is glamorous -- London or Gibraltar -- but elite tournaments are often held in out-of-the-way places that [...]

Could chess be an Olympic sport? Such an idea may seem absurd to some people, but the World Chess Federation has been lobbying the International Olympic Committee for years to [...]

Is there something wrong with Viswanathan Anand? Anand, the world champion, has played listlessly in his last few tournaments, and his world ranking is close to slipping to No. 4. [...]

America has a new world champion, and he is only 8 years old. The new titleholder, Awonder Liang of Wisconsin, tied for first in the under-8 section of the World [...]

It is natural to focus on tournament games that ended decisively. After all, they determine the winners. But draws can be as exciting as any victory. They may be filled [...]

In the growing rivalry between the emerging superpowers China and India, Beijing scored a symbolic victory on Thursday: a Chinese woman won a chess match. The woman, Hou Yifan, 17, [...]

Jacqueline Piatigorsky, one of the most important figures in American chess in the 1960s, turned 100 this month. Piatigorsky, a member of the Rothschild banking family, was married to the [...]

Besides being exceptional works of art, the Lewis Chessmen are a historical marker in the development and spread of the game. The pieces are similar to today's, but there are [...]

Fewer than 2 percent of the 47,000 members of the United States Chess Federation are masters -- and just 13 of them are under the age of 14. Among that [...]

There are two firsts in the current ranking of the world's top competitors, which was released on Tuesday. Four of the players have a rating (the number used to create [...]

Here's a striking fact about the game: There is only one woman ranked among the world's top 100 players. There is no obvious reason for such a disparity in a [...]

PARIS -- One of Iran's top grandmasters was expelled from an international chess tournament on Tuesday after he refused to play a match against an Israeli opponent, the director of [...]

Tournament play after a long layoff is not easy, even for elite players. They can forget what they know about openings or fail to stay up to date. A larger [...]

CHESS has an intellectual pedigree, but as played on the streets of New York City by a small army of hustlers, it is a game unto itself -- a gritty [...]

When he was ranked No. 1 a few years ago, Veselin Topalov got into a strange habit of falling behind in tournaments before storming back to win. Magnus Carlsen, the [...]

When elite competitors take on a number of weaker opponents in simultaneous exhibitions, the stronger player has to move from board to board and has little time to formulate strategies. [...]

The difference between the game in the United States and Europe is easy to illustrate by comparing two team competitions currently under way. The European Club Cup, which ends Sunday [...]

Boaz Weinstein's opening move on Wall Street came as a result of chess. Mr. Weinstein, now a star hedge fund manager, was trying to get a summer job at Goldman [...]

Hou Yifan is the women's world champion, but she is also only 17 and continues to evolve as a player, which should scare her rivals. Hou struggled this summer playing [...]

The Soviet Union dominated chess for so many years partly because it could tap the talent pool in such a vast area. But after the Soviet system collapsed two decades [...]

Cheating and temper tantrums get a lot of attention at chess tournaments, but two players at the World Cup are making news for all the right reasons. During a match [...]

The Chess World Cup has been an important part of the world championship cycle since 2005. There was no guarantee, given the history of the World Chess Federation, that it [...]

The biggest tournaments in the United States are usually held in places like Philadelphia and Las Vegas, not New York and Los Angeles. The reasons are cost (rents for tournament [...]

At the recent World Junior Chess Championship in Chennai, India, Dariusz Swiercz of Poland, 17, won the overall title, and Cori T. Deysi of Peru, 18, captured the girls' crown. [...]

Two of America's best players recently returned from trips abroad after having very different results in international competitions. Hikaru Nakamura, the country's top player, has had a bit of a [...]

DEBT spirals: the term sounds ominous. As it should -- these market vortexes are posing grave dangers to the global economy right now.A national debt crisis is a bank run [...]

One lesson from the recent Biel Chess Festival in Switzerland and the Sparkassen Chess-Meeting in Germany is that the gap in skills between the world's best players and those in [...]

The Chess Olympiad, which was first held in 1924, is the most elite national team event in the world. But the World Team Championship is in some ways more competitive [...]

Magnus Carlsen is competing in Switzerland; Levon Aronian, Sergey Karjakin, Vassily Ivan- chuk and Teimour Radjabov in Ningbo, China; and Vladimir Kramnik and Hikaru Nakamura in Dortmund, Germany.But some of [...]