Teresa Croteau, age 14, of Portland, Ore., for her question:
HOW FAR BACK CAN CHESS BE TRACED?
The value of a chess piece depends on its ability tomove. The value of a bishop is considered to be higher thana knight because the bishop can reach a distant point faster.A pawn is said to have the value of one, while knights and bishops have a value of three. A rook wins five points while a queen has nine. Chess is a game of skill played by two people. The game is played on a board marked into 64 squares eight across andeight down and also with a set of pieces called men. Chess takes a lot of imagination. It is important to think a lot before making a move. It's much like a contestbetween two generals on a battlefield. Each player must know how to attack and defend. The object is to make the opponent's king surrender.
Chess was first played in Asia before the time of Christ. The name comes from the Persian word shah, meaning king.
Some scholars say that chess was invented in India and then it spread in about 500 A.D. to Persia, which is now Iran. They have discovered a likeness between our modern chess and an Indian game called chaturanga, which is still played in India and Iran under the name of shatranj.
The Arabs learned about chess when they conquered Persia in the 600s. They brought the game with them to Spain and from there it spread throughout Europe.
Modern chess is said to date back to the 1500s. It was at this time that the pieces took their present form. Explorers reaching North and South America during the 1500s were chess players. The game quickly became popular in the American colonies. Benjamin Franklin was an early booster.
The first international chess tournament was held in 1851 in London but it wasn't until 1866 when the official title of "World Champion" was awarded. The first crown went to an Austrian named William Steinitz who defeated a German named Adolf Anderssen.
Many chess champions have become skilled players at early ages. Samuel Reshevsky, who came to the United States from Poland in 1920, was a chess master at the age of eight. He won the U.S. championship six times. Bobby Fischer won the U.S. chess title in 1958 when he was 14 years old.
Bobby Fischer became the first American to win the official world chess championship when he defeated Boris Spassky of Russia in 1972. The International Chess Foundation took Fischer's title away from him in 1975 when he refused to play challenger Anatoly Karpov of Russia, and Karpov claimed the world title by default.