Spicing Up Chess - Uppercuts, Giant Pieces and the Turk

When you think of a chess match you probably imagine two people locked in concentration, silently staring at a chess board. But there are some interesting historical chess facts that challenge that image. Consider some of the ways people have tried to spice up the game of the years.

Having real people play the roles of chess pieces on a giant chess board is an idea that has been around at least since 1891, when the Club of Living Chess formed in Dublin, Ireland. Since 1923, a game with human chess pieces takes place in Marostica, Italy every two years to celebrate a legendary 15th century game between two rival suitors. Nowadays, human chess matches are often staged at Renaissance Fairs, sometimes as Combat Chess featuring choreographed stage combat.

Combat chess has been taken to a new level with the recent development of Chess Boxing. Originally imagined by Serbian graphic novelist Enki Bilal in 1992, Chess Boxing became a reality in 2001, when Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh designed a match format alternating between rounds of boxing and chess in which contestants can win either by checkmate or knockout. It has since grown into a seriously competitive sport complete with a World Chess Boxing Organization, coherent rules, and an annual world championship.

There has also been a long tradition of designing nonhuman chess champions. In 1770, a Hungarian inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen built a life-sized, mechanical chess player known as "The Turk" that moved chess pieces with a mechanical hand and even made certain facial expressions. "The Turk" played well-known chess players of its time, including Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte, and often won. This tradition carried on with a number of chess playing computers in the last several decades including Deep Thought and Deep Blue, which actually took one game from world champion Garry Kasparov in 1996, before Kasparov rallied back to win the match. A year later, an upgraded computer, known as "Deeper Blue, " defeated Kasparov in a rematch, prompting the champion to accused the computer's manufacturers, IBM, of cheating.



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