201-3193 Torrefranca, Juliet C.

BSAIS 2A

Assessment Task

1. Search some information or brief description of their contribution about the persons involved in the development of
chess all over the world. Attach an image as well.

a. Wilhelm Steinitz
Wilhelm Steinitz was an Austrian master and the first official world
champion. He held the title from 1886-1894, after dominating the chess
scene for decades before. He was undefeated in match play for over 30
years (1862-1894).

Style

When Steinitz entered the chess scene in the 1850s, aggressive play was all
the rage. He played in this romantic fashion full of gambits and sacrifices at
first, but he later changed the landscape of chess forever when he revealed a
new positional style of play. He defended his new positional ideas furiously,
and they were eventually accepted by many other masters. This new positional style laid the groundwork for
modern chess.

First Official World Champion

The Steinitz - Zukertort match of 1886 would be the first to decide an official world champion. The format for
this match would be the first to ten wins. Steinitz had a terrible start to the match, and after five games
Zukertort led by a score of 4-1. Then the match had a complete reversal, as Steinitz mounted a comeback for
the ages. The final score was 12.5-7.5 (10 wins, 5 losses, 5 draws) in favor os Steinitz. The results of this
match put an end to any debate regarding who was the top player at the time, and Steinitz was crowned the
first official world champion.

b. Jose Raul Capablanca

Capablanca invented a new chess variant that was played on a
10x10 or 10x8 board. It was he who introduced two new pieces – the
chancellor (that had a combination of the moves of a knight and a rook) and
the archbishop (with the moves of a bishop and knight).
 c. Robert Fischer
Bobby Fischer was a record-setting chess master who became the youngest player to
win the U.S. Chess Championship at 14, and the first American-born player to win
the World Chess Championship.

d. Mikhail MoiseyevichBotvinnik
Mikhail MoiseyevichBotvinnik, (born August 17 [August 4, Old Style], 1911,
Kuokkala, Finland [now Repino, Russia]—died May 5, 1995, Moscow, Russia),
Soviet chess master who held the world championship three times (1948–57,
1958–60, and 1961–63).

At the age of 14, less than two years after he had learned the moves of chess,
Botvinnik defeated the then-current world champion, José RaúlCapablanca, in one
game of an exhibition in which Capablanca played simultaneously against several
opponents. In 1931 Botvinnik won the chess championship of the Soviet Union for
the first of seven times. He won the world championship in a 1948 tournament held
to choose a successor to Alexander Alekhine, whose death in 1946 had left the title vacant. Botvinnik lost the title in
1957 to VasilySmyslov but regained it the following year; in 1960 he was challenged successfully by Mikhail Tal, but he
once more regained the championship in 1961. After losing to TigranPetrosyan in 1963, he abandoned competition for
the world title, though he continued to play in important tournaments and to write on chess.

e. Garry Kasparov
Garry Kasparov is a Soviet-born chess master who became the world chess champion in
1985. Kasparov was the youngest world chess champion (at 22 years of age), and he is also
known for his matches against a computer known as Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997
 f. Vera Menchi
The world's first women's chess champion, Vera Menchik was born in Russia in
1906, learned chess at age nine, and moved to England as a teenager in 1921. Over
the course of her career, she competed for Russia, Czechoslovakia, and England.
She became the first Women's World Champion in 1927, and successfully
defended her title six times over the next 17 years. She would lose only one game
over the course of these seven championship tournaments.

g. Howard Stauton

Howard Staunton was an English chess master who is considered the unofficial
world champion from 1843 to 1851. Staunton started making a name for himself
as a prominent chess player after defeating the strong John Cochrane in a series of
matches. His peak came after defeating the previous "world champion" Pierre
Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant in 1843. Staunton's victory over his French
opponent made many people consider him to be the strongest active player of the
time.

h. Harold James Murray

Harold James Ruthven Murray was a son of Sir James Murray, first editor of the
Oxford English Dictionary. The younger Murray assisted in the project by
researching some 27,000 quotations before going to University.

He received a degree in mathematics from Oxford in 1890, then worked at a

tutor at Queen's College Taunton where he learned to play chess. In 1897, he
was encouraged by Baron Tassilo von Heydebrand und der Lasa to do research
into the game's history.
This grew into thirteen years of work using large private collections such as that of John G. White (Cleveland, Ohio) and
J. W. Rimington Wilson (England), and involved learning Arabic to read ancient manuscripts. The result was the scholarly
History of Chess (1913), wherein Murray supported the now generally accepted theory that chess originated in India.

i. Florencio Campomanes

The former FIDE President Florencio Campomanes has died aged 83.
Campomanes achieved National Master status as a player, and represented the
Philippines at five Olympiads in the 1950's and 60's (wikipedia entry here). But it
for his dedicated work for the world chess governing body FIDE, that he will be
best remembered. As the national FIDE delegate for the Philippines, he helped
bring the 1978 world chess championship match between Anatoly Karpov and
Viktor Korchnoi to Baguio City. Campomanes was elected FIDE president in 1982
and held the office until 1995, when he was succeeded by the present
incumbent, KirsanIlyumzhinov. Campomanes aimed to expand FIDE around the
world and he succeeded in making the chess governing body a truly global
organisation. Although he was not personally a rich man, he raised large prize funds for the world championships held
during his reign. However, Campomanes reign was also marred by the controversial abandonment of the first Karpov v
Kasparov match, and the damaging schism in 1993. In 2007, Campomanes was seriously injured in a car accident in
Turkey, and was fortunate to survive. Florencio Campomanes died on 3 May 2010. Rest In Peace.

j. Eugene Torre

Philippine grandmaster Eugene Torre has been a trailblazer for Asian chess for
half a century, achieving a number of continental milestones including first
grandmaster (1974), first to defeat a reigning world champion (Anatoly Karpov in
1976), and first to reach the Candidates stage of the World Championship (1982-
1983). A member of the Philippine Olympiad team a record 23 times, Torre won
three individual medals on board one (silver at Nice 1974 and bronze at Malta
1980 and Dubai 1986). He also won a bronze medal on board three at Baku 2016
at the age of 64. Torre was the official second of Bobby Fischer in his 1992 rematch with Boris Spassky.