World Chess ChampionshipThe World Chess Championship is played to determine the world champion in chess. The current world champion is Ding Liren, who defeated his opponent Ian Nepomniachtchi in the 2023 World Chess Championship. Magnus Carlsen, the previous world champion, declined to defend his title. The first event recognized as a world championship was the 1886 match between the two leading players in the world, Wilhelm Steinitz and Johannes Zukertort. Steinitz won, becoming the first world champion.
Internet chess serverAn Internet chess server (ICS) is an external server that provides the facility to play, discuss, and view the board game of chess over the Internet. The term specifically refers to facilities for connecting players through a variety of graphical chess clients located on each user's computer. In the 1970s, one could play correspondence chess in a PLATO System program called 'chess3'. Several users used chess3 regularly; often a particular user would make several moves per day, sometimes with several games simultaneously in progress.
Stockfish (chess)Stockfish is a free and open-source chess engine, available for various desktop and mobile platforms. It can be used in chess software through the Universal Chess Interface. Stockfish has consistently ranked first or near the top of most chess-engine rating lists and, as of April 2023, is the strongest CPU chess engine in the world. Its estimated Elo rating is around 3550 (CCRL 40/15). It has won the Top Chess Engine Championship 14 times and the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship 19 times.
Chess.comChess.com is an internet chess server and social networking website. The site has a freemium model in which some features are available for free, and others are available for accounts with subscriptions. Live online chess can be played against other users in daily, rapid, blitz or bullet time controls, with a number of chess variants also available. Chess versus a chess engine, computer analysis, chess puzzles and teaching resources are also offered.
HIARCSHIARCS is a proprietary UCI chess engine developed by Mark Uniacke. Its name is an acronym standing for higher intelligence auto-response chess system. Because Hiarcs is written portable in C, it is available on multiple platforms such as Pocket PC, Palm OS, PDAs, iOS, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. HIARCS opening book authors over time were Eric Hallsworth, Sebastian Böhme and Harvey Williamson, who is also operating HIARCS regularly at various computer chess tournaments.
Multiplayer online battle arenaMultiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) is a subgenre of strategy video games in which two teams of players compete against each other on a predefined battlefield. Each player controls a single character with a set of distinctive abilities that improve over the course of a game and which contribute to the team's overall strategy. The typical ultimate objective is for each team to destroy their opponents' main structure, located at the opposite corner of the battlefield.
EsportsEsports, short for electronic sports, is a form of competition using video games. Esports often takes the form of organized, multiplayer video game competitions, particularly between professional players, individually or as teams. Multiplayer competitions were long a part of video game culture, but were largely between amateurs until the late 2000s, when the advent of online streaming media platforms, particularly YouTube and Twitch, enabled a surge in participation by professional gamers and spectators.
ChessChess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to distinguish it from related games, such as xiangqi (Chinese chess) and shogi (Japanese chess). The recorded history of chess goes back at least to the emergence of a similar game, chaturanga, in seventh century India.
Board gameBoard games are tabletop games that typically use . These pieces are moved or placed on a pre-marked board (playing surface) and often include elements of table, card, role-playing, and miniatures games as well. Many board games feature a competition between two or more players. To show a few examples: in checkers (British English name 'draughts'), a player wins by capturing all opposing pieces, while Eurogames often end with a calculation of final scores.
Computer chessComputer chess includes both hardware (dedicated computers) and software capable of playing chess. Computer chess provides opportunities for players to practice even in the absence of human opponents, and also provides opportunities for analysis, entertainment and training. Computer chess applications that play at the level of a chess master or higher are available on hardware from supercomputers to smart phones. Standalone chess-playing machines are also available.
