📚How Chess Conquered The World 🌍 #chess #chessmates #chessstrategies

How Chess Spread Around The World
July 20 is International Chess Day, and few games are played more broadly worldwide than chess. At the last Chess Olympiad in 2022, 186 nations sent more than 1,700 players to compete. Estimates of the number of players globally usually range from 600 million to 800 million, or 10% of the world population.

But how did this game spread across the entire world? There are two ways to view this question. Thanks to PogChamps, The Queen's Gambit, Mittens, and other phenomena, chess has become very popular in recent years. You can read more about that here, here, and elsewhere.
Chaturanga In India
The oldest known game that chess evolved from is called chaturanga, which was born in India no later than the sixth century, an excellent historical place and time to become popular elsewhere through conquest and trade. It spread both west and east, evolving as it did. The westward spread through Iran, the Middle East, and Europe is how chaturanga became chess. It is only fitting that India today is one of the strongest chess countries (perhaps even the strongest) in the entire world.
The name chaturanga literally means the "four branches of the military:" chariots (rooks), elephants (the future bishops), calvary (knights), and infantry (pawns). The piece set was completed by the king and his counselor (the future queen). If you've ever wondered why piece names are so different across languages, it's because of how the game has developed. As the game spread, different pieces took on different names in some parts of the world and kept their names in others.
Shatranj In Persia And The Middle East
As chaturanga moved westward into modern-day Iran, it became shatranj. That is still the word for chess in Iranian, Arabic, and other languages. This version of chess then spread to the rest of the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Spain—all parts of the burgeoning Islamic empire.
Finally, in 1881, the Italian Chess Federation formalized all three rules into their modern versions, becoming the last place to get rid of all the weird variations on them. And thus the geographical spread of chess as we know it can be considered complete.

But don't forget stalemate—in 1700s England, if you stalemated your opponent, you lost! This was finally changed in 1808, decades before the fateful Italian meeting.