Competition

World Chess Championship

Mind Sport World Championships

The World Chess Championship determines the recognized world champion of chess. The current lineage of recognized champions is usually traced to the 1886 match between Wilhelm Steinitz and Johannes Zukertort, generally regarded as the first officially recognized championship match with an agreed stake and format, after which Steinitz was recognized as the first World Champion. Earlier strong players, including Steinitz himself from 1866 and, well before him, a long running informal succession of the strongest known players going back to the mid eighteenth century such as Francois-Andre Danican Philidor, were sometimes retrospectively regarded as unofficial champions, but 1886 is treated as the formal origin because it is the first match organized specifically as a championship contest. Governance of the title passed to FIDE, the Federation Internationale des Echecs, founded in 1924, from 1948 onward. Between 1993 and 2006 a rival championship lineage existed after Garry Kasparov split from FIDE to form the Professional Chess Association, a genuinely contested period in the championship own history that ended with a 2006 reunification match.

Facts

Disputed

Founding Year

1886 1

1886, the year of the Steinitz versus Zukertort match, is generally regarded as the first officially recognized World Chess Championship because it was the first match organized specifically as a championship contest with an agreed stake and format. Steinitz was already regarded by many as the strongest active player from 1866, and an informal, retrospectively named succession of leading players is sometimes traced back to the mid eighteenth century, so earlier dates are sometimes cited for an unofficial lineage of championship level play. From 1993 to 2006 a rival championship lineage also existed after Garry Kasparov split from FIDE, a further complication in treating the title history as a single unbroken line.

Founding Date

1886-01-11 1

Frequency

Irregular historically, contested at intervals typically of one to three years since the mid twentieth century; not held on a fixed cycle like the Olympic Games or the FIFA World Cup. 1

Host History

Historically played with no fixed venue; recent championship matches have been awarded by bid to host cities including New York, London, Moscow and Astana. 1

Classification

Scope

World or International 1

Frequency

Frequency (category)

Irregular 1

Learn More

A Champion Walks Away: Kasparov, FIDE, and Thirteen Years of Two Titles

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Garry Kasparov became World Champion in 1985 by defeating Anatoly Karpov, and he held the title through the tense final years of the Cold War chess rivalry the two men's matches had come to symbolize. In 1993, preparing to defend his title against the English challenger Nigel Short, Kasparov and Short broke from FIDE entirely, objecting to the federation's financial terms and organization of the match. The two players formed a rival body, the Professional Chess Association, and played their championship match under its banner instead.

FIDE did not recognize the breakaway and organized its own championship cycle in parallel, crowning a separate line of champions, including Karpov himself, who defeated Jan Timman in a FIDE title match the same year, and later a series of champions produced through FIDE's new knockout tournament format. For thirteen years, two players could each describe themselves as the reigning World Chess Champion: Kasparov's classical lineage, carried after his own retirement in 2005 by Vladimir Kramnik, and FIDE's separately organized title.

Kasparov's own position, recorded on this atlas as a documented dissent against FIDE's claim to have preserved an unbroken championship, held that FIDE had forfeited its authority the moment it allowed the 1993 match to proceed outside its structure, and that his and Kramnik's lineage, not FIDE's, was the legitimate continuation of the title Steinitz had first won in 1886. The split ended only in 2006, when Kramnik played the FIDE champion Veselin Topalov in a unification match, restoring a single recognized World Chess Champion for the first time in over a decade.

Before There Was a Title: How an Informal Succession Became a Championship

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Long before 1886 gave the World Chess Championship its first formally contested match, players were already informally regarded, in their own time, as the strongest in the world. Francois-Andre Danican Philidor, the eighteenth century French composer and player whose 1749 treatise Analyse du jeu des Echecs remained an authority for a century, was considered the finest player of his era for decades without ever contesting a match billed as a championship. A loose, retrospective succession of similarly dominant players followed him into the nineteenth century, including Wilhelm Steinitz himself, who was already regarded by many as the world's strongest player from his 1866 victory over Adolf Anderssen, two decades before his 1886 match with Johannes Zukertort made the title official.

The championship's early informality left its governance almost entirely in the champion's own hands. Champions set their own conditions for accepting challenges, a practice that produced long, contested gaps, most notoriously Jose Raul Capablanca's 1922 London Rules, which required any challenger to raise a large financial guarantee before a title match could be arranged, a barrier that helped keep Capablanca himself from a rematch after losing the title to Alexander Alekhine in 1927.

Alekhine's death in 1946, still holding the title, left the championship with no reigning champion for the first time in its history and no established process for choosing one. The International Chess Federation, FIDE, founded in 1924 but until then a peripheral organizing body, stepped into that vacuum, organizing a 1948 match tournament in The Hague and Moscow among the world's leading players. Mikhail Botvinnik won it, becoming the first champion to hold the title under FIDE's direct administration, a governance arrangement that lasted unchallenged until Kasparov's own break with the federation in 1993.

FAQs

Where was the first World Chess Championship match played?

In the United States, from 11 January to 29 March 1886.

The 1886 match between Wilhelm Steinitz and Johannes Zukertort is treated as the first official World Chess Championship because it was the first match organized specifically as a championship contest, with an agreed stake and format. It was played in the United States, running from 11 January to 29 March 1886.

Connections