Facts

1. Indian Grandmasters Praggnanandha Rameshbabu, Gukesh Dommaraju, and Arjun Erigaisi are the 17th, 5th and 4th best players in the world, although they all have defeated the world chess champion Magnus Carlsen.

2. The worst performance by a player was Macleod of Canada who lost 31 games in the New York double-round robin of 1889.

3. During World War II, some of the top Chess players were also code breakers. British masters Harry Golombek, Stuart Milner-Barry and H. O'D. Alexander was on the team which broke the Nazi Enigma code.

4. The second book ever printed in the English language was about chess!

5. About 600,000,000 (Six Hundred Million) people know how to play chess worldwide!

6. According to the US Chess Federation, there are an estimated 169 Octillion ways to play the first ten chess game moves.

7. The reason why traditional chess pieces don't look like actual soldiers, bishops, and kings is because before the game reached Europe, it passed through the Islamic world. Islam forbids making statues of animals or people, so chess pieces became vague-looking. When the game spread to Christian Europe, the pieces didn't change much.

8. The first-ever outer space chess game was held on June 9, 1970, between space and Earth. The game ended in a draw.

9. Chess supposedly evolved from the ancient game of Chaturanga from the Gupta empire. Legend says that a prince returned from war and his brother died. He used the Āshtapad (8x8) board to with different pieces representing different soldiers explain the situation to his mother.

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