World Chess Championship
The World Chess Championship is played to determine the world champion in chess. The current world champion is Gukesh Dommaraju, who defeated the previous champion Ding Liren in the 2024 World Chess Championship.
The first event recognized as a world championship was the 1886 match between Wilhelm Steinitz and Johannes Zukertort. Steinitz won, making him the first world champion. From 1886 to 1946, the champion set the terms, requiring any challenger to raise a sizable stake and defeat the champion in a match in order to become the new world champion. Following the death of reigning world champion Alexander Alekhine in 1946, the International Chess Federation took over administration of the World Championship, beginning with the 1948 tournament. From 1948 to 1993, FIDE organized a set of tournaments and matches to choose a new challenger for the world championship match, which was held every three years.
Before the 1993 match, then reigning champion Garry Kasparov and his championship rival Nigel Short broke away from FIDE, and conducted the match under the umbrella of the newly formed Professional Chess Association. FIDE conducted its own tournament, which was won by Anatoly Karpov, and led to a rival claimant to the title of World Champion for the next thirteen years until 2006. The titles were unified at the World Chess Championship 2006, and all the subsequent tournaments and matches have once again been administered by FIDE. Since 2014, the championship has settled on a two-year cycle, with championship matches conducted every even year.
Emanuel Lasker was the longest serving World Champion, having held the title for 27 years, and holds the record for the most Championship wins with six along with Kasparov and Karpov.
Though the world championship is open to all players, there are separate championships for women, under-20s and lower age groups, and seniors. There are also chess world championships in rapid, blitz, correspondence, problem solving, Fischer random chess, and computer chess.
History
Early champions (pre-1886)
Before 1851
The game of chess in its modern form emerged in Spain in the 15th century, though rule variations persisted until the late 19th century. Before Wilhelm Steinitz and Johannes Zukertort in the late 19th century, no chess player seriously claimed to be champion of the world. The phrase was used by some chess writers to describe other players of their day, and the status of being the best at the time has sometimes been awarded in retrospect, going back to the early 17th-century Italian player Gioachino Greco. Richard Lambe, in his 1764 book The History of Chess, wrote that the 18th-century French player François-André Danican Philidor was "supposed to be the best Chess-player in the world". Philidor wrote an extremely successful chess book and gave public demonstrations of his blindfold chess skills. However, some of Philidor's contemporaries were not convinced by the analysis Philidor gave in his book, and some more recent authors have echoed these doubts.In the early 19th century, it was generally considered that the French player Alexandre Deschapelles was the strongest player of the time, though three games between him and the English player William Lewis in 1821 suggests that they were on par. After Deschapelles and Lewis withdrew from play, the strongest players competing in France and Britain respectively were recognised as Louis de la Bourdonnais and Alexander McDonnell. La Bourdonnais visited England in 1825, where he played many games against Lewis and won most of them, and defeated all the other English masters despite offering handicaps. He and McDonnell contested a long series of matches in 1834. These were the first to be adequately reported, and they somewhat resemble the later world championship matches. Approximately 85 games were played, with La Bourdonnais winning a majority of the games.
In 1839, George Walker wrote "The sceptre of chess, in Europe, has been for the last century, at least, wielded by a Gallic dynasty. It has passed from Legalle to La Bourdonnais, through the grasp, successively, of Philidor, Bernard, Carlier , and Deschapelles". In 1840, a columnist in Fraser's Magazine wrote, "Will Gaul continue the dynasty by placing a fourth Frenchman on the throne of the world? the three last chess chiefs having been successively Philidor, Deschapelles, and De La Bourdonnais."
After La Bourdonnais' death in December 1840, Englishman Howard Staunton's match victory over another Frenchman, Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant, in 1843 is considered to have established Staunton as the world's strongest player, at least in England and France. By the 1830s, players from Germany and more generally Central Europe were beginning to appear on the scene: the strongest of the Berlin players around 1840 was probably Ludwig Bledow, co-founder of the Berlin Pleiades. The earliest recorded use of the term "World Champion" was in 1845, when Staunton was described as "the Chess Champion of England, or ... the Champion of the World".
From 1851 to 1886
An important milestone was the London 1851 chess tournament, which was the first international chess tournament, organized by Staunton. It was played as a series of matches, and was won convincingly by the German Adolf Anderssen, including a 4–1 semi-final win over Staunton. This established Anderssen as the world's leading player. In 1893, Henry Bird retrospectively awarded the title of first world chess champion to Anderssen for his victory, but there is no evidence that he was widely acclaimed as such at the time, and no mention of such a status afterwards in the tournament book by Staunton. Indeed, Staunton's tournament book calls Anderssen "after Heydebrand der Laza , the best player of Germany": von der Lasa was unable to attend the 1851 tournament, though he was invited. In 1851, Anderssen lost a match to von der Lasa; in 1856, George Walker wrote that " and Anderssen are decidedly the two best in the known world". Von der Lasa did not compete in tournaments or formal matches because of the demands of his diplomatic career, but his games show that he was one of the world's best then: he won series of games against Staunton in 1844 and 1853.Anderssen was himself decisively beaten in an 1858 match against the American Paul Morphy. In 1858–59 Morphy played matches against several leading players, beating them all. This prompted some commentators at the time to call him the world champion: Gabriel-Éloy Doazan, who knew Morphy, wrote that "one can and...must place in the same bracket" as Deschapelles and La Bourdonnais, who he had played years before, and that "his superiority is as obvious as theirs". But when Morphy returned to America in 1859, he abruptly retired from chess, though many considered him the world champion until his death in 1884. His sudden withdrawal from chess at his peak led to his being known as "the pride and sorrow of chess".
After Morphy's retirement from chess, Anderssen was again regarded as the world's strongest active player, a reputation he reinforced by winning the strong London 1862 chess tournament. Louis Paulsen and Ignatz Kolisch were also playing at a comparable standard to Anderssen in the 1860s: Anderssen narrowly won a match against Kolisch in 1861, and drew against Paulsen in 1862.
In 1866, Wilhelm Steinitz narrowly defeated Anderssen in a match. However, he was not immediately able to conclusively demonstrate his superiority. Steinitz placed third at the Paris 1867 chess tournament, behind Kolisch and Szymon Winawer; he placed second at the Dundee 1867 tournament, behind Gustav Neumann; and he again placed second at the Baden-Baden 1870 chess tournament, which was the strongest that had been held to date. Steinitz confirmed his standing as the world's leading player by winning the London 1872 tournament, winning a match against Johannes Zukertort in 1872, winning the Vienna 1873 chess tournament, and decisively winning a match over Joseph Henry Blackburne 7–0 in 1876.
Apart from the Blackburne match, Steinitz played no competitive chess between the Vienna tournaments of 1873 and 1882. During that time, Zukertort emerged as the world's leading active player, winning the Paris 1878 chess tournament. Zukertort then won the London 1883 chess tournament by a convincing 3-point margin, ahead of nearly every leading player in the world, with Steinitz finishing second. This tournament established Steinitz and Zukertort as the best two players in the world, and led to a match between these two, the World Chess Championship 1886, won by Steinitz.
There is some debate over whether to date Steinitz's reign as world champion from his win over Anderssen in 1866, or from his win over Zukertort in 1886. The 1886 match was clearly agreed to be for the world championship, but there is no indication that Steinitz was regarded as the defending champion. There is also no known evidence of Steinitz being called the world champion after defeating Anderssen in 1866. It has been suggested that Steinitz could not make such a claim while Morphy was alive. There are a number of references to Steinitz as world champion in the 1870s, the earliest being after the first Zukertort match in 1872. Later, in 1879, it was argued that Zukertort was world champion, since Morphy and Steinitz were not active. However, later in his career, at least from 1887, Steinitz dated his reign from this 1866 match, and early sources such as the New York Times in 1894, Emanuel Lasker in 1908, and Reuben Fine in 1952 all do the same.
Many modern commentators divide Steinitz's reign into an "unofficial" one from 1866 to 1886, and an "official" one after 1886. By this reckoning, the first World Championship match was in 1886, and Steinitz was the first official World Chess Champion.
Champions before FIDE (1886–1946)
Reign of Wilhelm Steinitz (1886–1894)
Following the Steinitz–Zukertort match, a tradition continued of the world championship being decided by a match between the reigning champion, and a challenger: if a player thought he was strong enough, he would find financial backing for a match purse and challenge the reigning world champion. If he won, he would become the new champion.Steinitz successfully defended his world title against Mikhail Chigorin in 1889, Isidor Gunsberg in 1891, and Chigorin again in 1892.
In 1887, the American Chess Congress started work on drawing up regulations for the future conduct of world championship contests. Steinitz supported this endeavor, as he thought he was becoming too old to remain world champion. The proposal evolved through many forms, and resulted in the 1889 tournament in New York to select a challenger for Steinitz, rather like the more recent Candidates Tournaments. The tournament was duly played, but the outcome was not quite as planned: Chigorin and Max Weiss tied for first place; their play-off resulted in four draws; and neither wanted to play a match against Steinitz – Chigorin had just lost to him, and Weiss wanted to get back to his work for the Rothschild Bank. The third prizewinner, Isidor Gunsberg, was prepared to play Steinitz for the title in New York, so this match was played in 1890–1891 and was won by Steinitz. The experiment was not repeated, and Steinitz's later matches were private arrangements between the players.
Two young strong players emerged in late 1880s and early 1890s: Siegbert Tarrasch and Emanuel Lasker. Tarrasch had the better tournament results at the time, but it was Lasker who was able to raise the money to challenge Steinitz. Lasker won the 1894 match and succeeded Steinitz as world champion.