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Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a chequered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in parks, clubs, online, by correspondence and in tournaments.

The first official World Chess Championship was held in 1886 and was won by Prague-born Wilhelm Steinitz. In addition to the World Championship, there are the Women's World Championship, the Junior World Championship, the World Senior Championship, the Correspondence Chess World Championship, the World Computer Chess Championship, and Blitz and Rapid World Championships. The Chess Olympiad is a popular competition among teams from different nations. Online chess has provided amateur and professional competition to a large and varied group of players.

Since the second half of the 20th century, computers have been programmed to play chess with increasing success, whereby a powerful home computers is able to play chess at a higher level than the best human players. In the past two decades computer analysis has contributed significantly to chess theory. The computer 'Deep Blue', a chess-playing computer developed by American computer company IBM, was the first machine to overcome a reigning World Chess Champion in a match, when it defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997.