Chess

Chess.com is the #1 Website for this type of board game. It is, of course, a website where you can play this game for free. But you will also find puzzles and opportunities to learn chess in case you don’t know anything about it. In addition, you will find news, information about events, and you can connect to other players, blogs, and forums.

If you want to play chess, you can play against the computer or other human players. For this, you can first provide information about your skills, and then you can play against someone who will match your skill level. This means, if you’re a beginner, you can play against other beginners. But if you have already acquired some advanced skills, you can play against a Pro to make it a bit more challenging. That chess.com is extremely popular is immediately visible when you visit the website. Whenever I open the website, more than 100.000 people are playing.

What is Chess?

According to Wikipedia, chess is a recreational and competitive board game played between two players. The rules are simple. The square board is made of eight by eight fields, and every player gets 16 pieces. There are six different pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns. Every kind moves differently.

It would go too far for this blog to explain everything in detail. You can read all about it on Wikipedia or chess.com. But it is not difficult to learn the basic rules. What makes chess so challenging is the number of possible moves and finding the right strategy to defeat your opponent. I claim to know the basic rules, but I have never beaten my chess software. Not the new ones with their advanced AI engines anyway. But even against my old chess software (Grandmaster Chess) on my old Commodore 64 (yes, that long time ago), I lost in only 34 moves. I guess I’m no good.

An interesting fact

It’s about Mathematics. In an old story, a man presented chess to a great king, and to thank the man, the king offered him any reward he wanted. The man asked that a single grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard. Then two grains on the second square, four grains on the third, and so on. Doubling each time. How much rice would the man get?

I don’t want to bother you with the exact number. But if you want to calculate, remember that the first square has one grain of rice, and we will double for every following square. So if N is the number of rice grains to calculate, the equation would be N = 2^n-1, with n being the number of squares. For the first square (n = 1) we will get N = 2^1-1 = 2⁰ = 1. That means there is one grain of rice on the first square. That is the initial condition.

For the second square you get N = 2^2-1 = 2¹ = 2 grains of rice. For the third square you get N = 2^3-1 = 2² = 4 grains of rice. And so on.

Now, the chessboard has 8 times 8 = 64 squares. Put that into the equation, and you get N = 2^64-1 = 2⁶³ = a colossal number already. But we are not done. We just calculated the number of grains on each square. Now we still have to add everything up to get the total number of grains. The equation (see Wikipedia for more details) is simple; it is N = 2⁶⁴-1 = a heap of rice that would be larger than Mount Everest.

The end of the story? You probably guessed it. The king had the man killed.

Interested in other free games? Have a look into our collection, me might have something for you.