Chess Pieces FAQs
What was the Immortal Game?
The Immortal Game was played during a break at a larger chess competition in London in 1851. Adolf Anderssen won the match against Lionel Kieseritzky, and has been oft studied since. The brilliance of Anderssen’s strategy lay in his willingness to sacrifice important pieces in order to ultimately win the game. More conservative styles were then popular and this daring strategy stunned the chess world. As a side note, the match is replayed every year on September 2 in the Italian town of Marostica. Rather than play with pieces though, actors play the pieces in dramatic mini-battles.
What was Deep Blue?Deep Blue was an IBM super-computer that allegedly was the first machine to beat a human World Chess Champion. On February 17 1997, the machine beat then World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov. The champion and the machine had squared off the year before with Kasparov winning. Deep Blue was then modified and improved to beat Kasparov a year later. It has the ability to evaluate an astonishing 200 million moves per second. Kasparov insisted that the machine had been tampered with by IBM, when he sought a re-match IBM declined and had the machine dismantled.
What is the origin of the term checkmate?Checkmate, often shortened to mate, is the condition in which one player’s king has no legal move and must necessarily earn the opponent a victory. Checkmate comes from the Persian Word Shah Mat. Though commonly thought to mean that ‘the King is dead,’ it actually means that the king is ‘surprised’ or more appropriately ‘ambushed.’
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