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

Almost 30 nations include Chess in to their school curricula.

The FIDE (International Chess Federation) is the second largest sporting organization in the world.

There are well over 1,000 different openings, including variations within larger openings/defenses that one can learn.

The new pawn move,two squares on its first move instead of one, was first introduced in Spain in 1280.

From the starting position, there are eight different ways to Mate in two moves and 355 different ways to Mate in three moves.

The first mechanical clock to be used instead of sand glass was invented by Thomas Wilson in 1883. The modern push button clock was introduced by Veenhoff in 1900.

According to the America’s Foundation for Chess, there are 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,00 0,000,000 (approximately 1.70×10 29) ways to play the first 10 moves of a game of chess.

The shortest number of moves to achieve checkmate is just two moves! One sequence is called “Fool’s mate” Thus, 1. g4 e5 and 2.f3 Qh4# checkmate.

There are 72,084 different possible positions after two moves each. There are over 9 million different possible positions after three moves each. There are over 318 billion different possible positions after four moves each. The number of distinct 40-move games in chess is far greater than the number of electrons in the observable universe. The number of electrons is approximately 10^79 , while the number of unique chess games is 10^120.

 If you put one grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on, how many grains of wheat do you need to put on the 64th square 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains of wheat.

Chess began in India during the Gupta Empire, spreading to the Persian Sassanid Empire, and then to the Middle East after Muslims conquered Persia. From there, it spread to Europe and Russia.