It's been known as the 'king' of board games and it enjoys the privilege of having being invented thousands of years ago.
It is a game of skill, patience, technique and experience and it knows no age or class or gender or location.
What it does enjoy is to be thought of as a game for the intelligent.
It can keep the players absorbed for hours and it is known to improve one's judgment, creativity and analytical thinking.
Time was when it was a game played only in court but now you will find that it is played everywhere.
History has famous men who were also good chess players.
Some of them were Einstein, Napoleon, Charlie Chaplin and Nikola Tesla.
What do you need if you want to play chess? You need a chess board and the pieces that go with it.
Of course, if you want to play online, you don't need any of these.
The main aim of the game is to capture the opponent's King and everything in the game moves towards this final climax.
The board itself is an 8"x 8" board with alternate squares of black and white.
There are 32 pieces with which you have to play, of which each player has 16 so there are 16 white pieces and 16 black.
This sort of classifies the players as White and Black.
Here are the 16 pieces: a King, a Queen, 2 Rooks, 2 Bishops, 2 Knights and 8 pawns.
There is a definite place on the board where each piece goes.
The White player has to place his pieces on the two ranks closest to him and the Black player likewise.
The pawns from both the sides go in the innermost ranks.
The outermost ranks have the other pieces and they follow an order like this: Rook, Knight, Bishop, Queen, King, Bishop, Knight, Rook.
For the Black player, this order is followed right to left and for the White player, it is followed left to right.
How do you describe what the movements are on the chessboard? In order to make this easy, an algebraic chess notation was invented.
This helps to know exactly on which square a piece has been moved to.
To facilitate this, while the horizontal lines are called ranks, the vertical ones are called files.
Viewing the board from the White player's side, the first file on the left is called 'a', then it goes on to 'b', etc till it gets to the last file which is called 'h'.
In the same way, horizontally, the first row closest to the White player is called rank 1 or the first rank, then goes through to 2, 3 etc till it gets to 8 which then is the one that is closest to the Black player.
So now, it becomes very easy to put an identifying tag to ever square on the chessboard.
So, viewed from the White player's side, the bottom-most square on the left is 'a1', which tells us that it is the first file and the first rank.
The white pawns therefore are put on the squares a2 to h2 while those on the Black player's side are from a7 to h7.
So the white king is on e1, the black king on e8, the white queen on d1, the black queen on d8.
On either side of these are the bishops, knights and rooks, with the rooks occupying the corner squares on the board.
The chessboard has to be in the position where the a1 square has to be black.