The Game of Chess Had Patch Notes, Too

The classic one-on-one strategy game of chess has, fundamentally, remained unchanged for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. You and your opponent each command an army of pieces and take turns making moves with the goal of capturing the other’s king. But across its several hundred years in the sun, changes big and small have been made to create the game we see today.

Chess has seen an astronomical rise in popularity over the past year. In December 2020, the game saw an average concurrent Twitch viewership of over 15,000, which is more than seven times its average the whole previous year. Much of this can be attributed to the Netflix drama The Queen’s Gambit, which accumulated over 62 million views globally within its debut month, and the Twitch tournament series PogChamps. The former presented a story about a disadvantaged chess prodigy chasing their dreams while struggling with drug abuse. The latter saw several prominent streamers being trained by expert chess players, then playing each other in a round-robin format stretched out across two weeks—opening chess to players and viewers who typically visit the site to watch video games about martial artists, wizards, and super-soldiers. Each of the first three Pogchamps have managed to hit over 100,000 peak concurrent viewers.

You can now find chess ranking high among Twitch’s viewership statistics, battling for views alongside heavy hitters like League of Legends and Call of Duty. And its appearance in the platform’s esports directory uniquely places chess as the only popular esport to have both existed and remained unchanged for the last hundred years.

In the earliest versions of chess, only the pieces we know as the knight, rook, and king moved as they do now, leading to a slower overall game. Bishops couldn't move infinitely on a diagonal, and pawns only moved a single space, so it took far longer for any meaningful interaction to occur.

The current versions' bishops and queens are all critical to applying pressure across the board. Without them in place, the king was much harder to pin down, because there weren’t many threats that could target it from afar. Bishops still moved on their respective diagonals, but only up to two spaces at a time. It wasn't until the late 14th century that a variant called "Mad Queen's chess" became popular enough to become the norm in Western Europe. It was also around this time that pawns were allowed to promote upon reaching the other side of the board. When this rule was first introduced, pawns would become queens—but once a stronger version of the queen became popularized, pawns were allowed to change into any other piece. Later, in the 1700s, it was tightened to be any already-captured piece. Ultimately, this settled in the 1800s to what we see today, where a pawn can turn into any piece, including the queen.

In the 1981 book A Short History of Chess, Davidson Henry explains that castling, a move where your rook and king change places, didn’t exist in its current form until the 17th century. The concept itself didn’t enter the game until around the 15th century, and back then, the maneuver was called the “King’s Leap.” Instead of sliding past the rook, the rule stated that the king could move two spaces once a game, or like a knight in some variants.

In the past, there were far more ways to win a chess match. In addition to the standard checkmate or concession, capturing all of your opponent’s pieces and forcing a stalemate were viable paths to victory. These other methods would be removed as the game developed, with the stalemates being the most volatile throughout time.

Right now, a stalemate is considered a draw. But before the 1800s, it was considered a win for the losing player. These rules were heavily dependent on the region the game took place in, and as noted in Harold J. R. Murray’s A History of Chess, a stalemate win was commonly considered to be an “inferior win,” and any player who won a competitive chess match in this way would only receive half of their winnings. Since then, chess experts have gone back and forth with regards to the rule. As recently as 2009, grand master Larry Kaufman argued in the 35th issue of Chess Life that a stalemate shouldn’t be a draw, because it’s a situation “where any move would get your king taken.”