The game of chess is commonly divided into three phases: the opening, middlegame, and endgame.John Watson, Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy: Advances Since Nimzowitsch, Gambit Publications, 1998, p. 10. . . There is a large body of theory regarding how the game should be played in each of these phases, especially the opening and endgame. Those who write about chess theory, who are often also eminent players, are referred to as "chess theorists" or "chess theoreticians".
"Opening theory" commonly refers to consensus, broadly represented by current literature on the openings.David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess, Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 1992, p. 418 ("theory" entry). . "Endgame theory" consists of statements regarding specific positions, or positions of a similar type, though there are few universally applicable principles.Hooper and Whyld, p. 418. "Middlegame theory" often refers to maxims or principles applicable to the middlegame.Watson, Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy, p. 10. The modern trend, however, is to assign paramount importance to analysis of the specific position at hand rather than to general principles.Watson, Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy, p. 11.
The development of theory in all of these areas has been assisted by the vast literature on the game. In 1913, preeminent chess historian H. J. R. Murray wrote in his 900-page magnum opus A History of Chess that, "The game possesses a literature which in contents probably exceeds that of all other games combined."H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess, Oxford University Press, 1913, p. 25. . This quote is also given in Hooper and Whyld, p. 229 ("literature of chess" entry). He estimated that at that time the "total number of books on chess, chess magazines, and newspapers devoting space regularly to the game probably exceeds 5,000".Murray, p. 25 n. 1. In 1949, B. H. Wood estimated that the number had increased to about 20,000.Hooper and Whyld, p. 229.See B. H. Wood, "Books About Chess", Illustrated London News, 1949, reprinted in Fred Reinfeld (editor), The Treasury of Chess Lore, Dover, 1959, pp. 268–70. David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld wrote in 1992 that, "Since then there has been a steady increase year by year of the number of new chess publications. No one knows how many have been printed..." The world's largest chess library, the John G. White Collection at the Cleveland Public Library, contains over 32,000 chess books and serials, including over 6,000 bound volumes of chess periodicals.Cleveland Public Library, Special Collections Chess players today also avail themselves of computer-based sources of information.
Opening theory
The earliest printed work on chess theory whose date can be established with some exactitude is Repeticion de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez by the Spaniard Luis Ramirez de Lucena, published c. 1497, which included among other things analysis of eleven chess openings. Some of them are known today as the Giuoco Piano, Ruy Lopez, Petrov's Defense, Bishop's Opening, Damiano's Defense, and Scandinavian Defense, though Lucena did not use those terms.Harry Golombek, Chess: A History, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976, pp. 97–101. .
The authorship and date of the Göttingen manuscript are not established,Murray, p. 782.Hooper and Whyld, p. 156 ("Göttingen manuscript" entry). and its publication date is estimated as being somewhere between 1471 and 1505.Hooper and Whyld, p. 156. It is not known whether it or Lucena's book was published first. The manuscript includes examples of games with the openings now known as Damiano's Defence, Philidor's Defense, the Giuoco Piano, Petrov's Defense, the Bishop's Opening, the Ruy Lopez, the Ponziani Opening, the Queen's Gambit Accepted, 1.d4 d5 2.Bf4 Bf5 (a form of the London System), Bird's Opening, and the English Opening.Murray, pp. 782–84. Murray observes that it "is no haphazard collection of commencements of games, but is an attempt to deal with the Openings in a systematic way."Murray, p. 784.
Fifteen years after Lucena's book, Portuguese apothecary Pedro Damiano published the book Questo libro e da imparare giocare a scachi et de la partiti (1512) in Rome. It includes analysis of the Queen's Gambit Accepted, showing what happens when Black tries to keep the gambit pawn with ...b5.Golombek, pp. 101–02. Damiano's book "was, in contemporary terms, the first bestseller of the modern game."Richard Eales, Chess: The History of a Game, Facts on File Publications, 1985, p. 81. . Harry Golombek writes that it "ran through eight editions in the sixteenth century and continued on into the next century with unflagging popularity."Golombek, p. 102. Modern players know Damiano primarily because his name is attached to the weak opening Damiano's Defense (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 f6?), although he condemned rather than endorsed it.Hooper and Whyld, p. 101 ("Damiano Defence" entry).
These books and later ones discuss games played with various openings, opening traps, and the best way for both sides to play. Certain sequences of opening moves began to be given names, some of the earliest being Damiano's Defense, the King's Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.f4), the Queen's Gambit (1.d4 d5 2.c4), and the Sicilian Defense (1.e4 c5).Murray, p. 886.
Damiano's book was followed by general treatises on chess play by Ruy López de Segura (1561), Giulio Cesare Polerio (1590), Pietro Carrera (1617), Gioachino Greco (c. 1625), Joseph Bertin (1735), and François-André Danican Philidor (1749).I.A. Horowitz, Chess Openings: Theory and Practice, Simon and Schuster, 1964.Hooper and Whyld, pp. 38–39 ("Bertin, Joseph" entry), 157–58 ("Greco, Gioacchino" entry).
The first author to attempt a comprehensive survey of the openings then known was Aaron Alexandre in his 1837 work Encyclopédie des Échecs.Hooper and Whyld, pp. 10, 280 ("Alexandre, Aaron" and "openings literature" entries). According to Hooper and Whyld, "[Carl] Jaenisch produced the first openings analysis on modern lines in his Analyse nouvelle des ouvertures (1842-43)."Hooper and Whyld, p. 280. In 1843, Paul Rudolf von Bilguer published the German Handbuch des Schachspiels, which combined the virtues of Alexandre and Jaenisch's works. The Handbuch, which went through several editions, last being published in several parts in 1912–16, was one of the most important opening references for many decades."Bilguer's Handbuch was the dominant reference for some time until it was superseded by a number of international treatises, which, in the English-speaking world, included Modern Chess Openings and Practical Chess Openings." I.A. Horowitz, Chess Openings: Theory and Practice, Simon and Schuster, 1964, p. VII. Four years after the first edition of the Handbuch was published, Howard Staunton in the preface to The Chess-Player's Handbook, discussed below, called the Handbuch "a production—whether considered in reference to its research, its suggestiveness, or the methodical completeness of its arrangement—which stands unrivalled and alone". Howard Staunton, The Chess-Player's Handbook, Henry C. Bohn, 1847, p. vii. The last edition of the Handbuch was edited by Carl Schlechter, who had drawn a match for the World Championship with Emanuel Lasker in 1910. International Master William Hartston called it "a superb work, perhaps the last to encase successfully the whole of chess knowledge within a single volume."William Hartston, The Kings of Chess, Harper & Row, 1985, p. 87. .
The English master Howard Staunton, perhaps the world's strongest player from 1843 to 1851,Statistician Arpad Elo, developer of the Elo rating system, analyzed the results of all 342 match, tournament, and exhibition games of record among the top nine players in the world from 1846 to 1862. From those games, he estimated the ratings of the top players during that period as 1. Paul Morphy 2695; 2. Adolf Anderssen 2552; 3. Daniel Harrwitz 2518; 4. Ignatz Kolisch 2516; 5. Staunton 2508. Arpad E. Elo, The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present, Arco Publishing, 1978, p. 55–56. . Staunton was arguably the strongest player in the world between 1843, when he won a match against the French champion Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant, and 1851, when he finished fourth in the London 1851 knock-out tournament, won by Anderssen. included over 300 pages of analysis of the openings in his 1847 treatise The Chess Player's Handbook.Staunton, pp. 59–401. That work immediately became the standard reference work in English-speaking countries,Hooper and Whyld state that it "became the standard reference work in English-speaking countries." Hooper and Whyld, p. 280 ("Openings literature" entry).Murray states that the book "took rank at once as the leading English text-book on chess." Murray, p. 885. and was reprinted 21 times by 1935.Richard Eales, Chess: The History of a Game, Facts on File Publications, 1985, p. 137 (the book "became the standard reference work for English club players down to the end of the century, with twenty-one reprints by 1935"). . However, "as time passed a demand arose for more up-to-date works in English".Hooper and Whyld, p. 280 ("Openings literature" entry). Wilhelm Steinitz, the first World Champion, widely considered the "father of modern chess,"Garry Kasparov, My Great Predecessors, Part I, Everyman Publishers, 2003, pp. 45–46. .Emanuel Lasker, Lasker's Manual of Chess, Dover Publications, 1960, pp. 188–229. .Richard Réti, Masters of the Chessboard, Dover Publications, 1976, pp. 47–49. .Anthony Saidy, The Battle of Chess Ideas, RHM Press, 1975, pp. 20–21. . extensively analyzed various double king-pawn openings (beginning 1.e4 e5) in his book The Modern Chess Instructor, published in 1889 and 1895.Wilhelm Steinitz, The Modern Chess Instructor, Edition Olms AG, Zürich, 1990 (reprint). . Also in 1889, E. Freeborough and C. E. Ranken published the first edition of Chess Openings Ancient and Modern; later editions were published in 1893, 1896, and 1910. In 1911, R. C. Griffith and J. H. White published the first edition of Modern Chess Openings. It is now the longest-published opening treatise in history; the fifteenth edition (commonly called MCO-15), by Grandmaster Nick de Firmian, was published in April 2008.Nick de Firmian, Modern Chess Openings, 15th Edition, McKay Chess Library, 2008. .
According to Hooper and Whyld, the various editions of Modern Chess Openings, the last edition of the Handbuch, and the fourth edition of Ludvig Collijn's Lärobok i Schack ("Textbook of Chess") in Swedish, with groundbreaking contributions by Rubinstein, Reti, Spielmann and Nimzowitch, "were the popular reference sources for strong players between the two world wars." In 1937–39 former World Champion Max Euwe published a twelve-volume opening treatise, De theorie der schaakopeningen, in Dutch. It was later translated into other languages.Hooper and Whyld, p. 281 ("Openings literature" entry).