From Steinitz to Gukesh: 140 Years of the World Chess Championship

Here is a number worth sitting with. In the 140 years since the first official World Chess Championship, twenty-four men have served as President of the United States. Across exactly the same stretch of history, only seventeen or eighteen men, depending on how you count the years when the title split, have held the undisputed world chess crown. Walking on the moon is rarer still, twelve people have managed that, but the gap is closer than you might think.

The chain runs unbroken from Wilhelm Steinitz, who won the first official match in 1886, to Gukesh Dommaraju, who took the title in Singapore in December 2024 at the age of eighteen. Between those two names sit some of the most extraordinary minds of the modern age: Lasker the philosopher, Capablanca the natural, Fischer the obsessive, Kasparov the force of nature, Carlsen the perfectionist who eventually walked away from his own crown.

And through all of it, one thing on the board has never changed. Every World Championship match since 1886 has been contested with pieces of the Staunton pattern, the design Jaques of London created in 1849. The players, the politics and the prize funds have transformed beyond recognition. The pieces have not.

New York, 1886: The Match That Started It All

Wilhelm Steinitz and Johannes Zukertort were the two strongest players alive, and in January 1886 they finally agreed to settle the argument across the board. The match travelled through three American cities, opening in New York, moving to St Louis and finishing in New Orleans. The terms were simple: the first man to ten wins would be champion of the world.

Zukertort began brilliantly and led 4-1 after the New York leg. Then Steinitz, the older and more methodical man, took the contest apart. He won 10-5 and became the first official World Chess Champion. The full story of that match is told at stauntonchess.com, and it reads like the founding document of modern chess: a private match, privately funded, with the title resting entirely on the result.

Steinitz held the crown for eight years. His deeper legacy was the principle he established: the championship passes only by defeating the holder over the board. That principle still stands today.

The Long Reigns: Lasker to the Soviet Machine

Emanuel Lasker took the title from Steinitz in 1894 and kept it for twenty-seven years, the longest reign the game has ever seen. He held off every challenger until 1921, when the Cuban José Raúl Capablanca, perhaps the most naturally gifted player in history, wore him down in Havana. Capablanca lost the crown to Alexander Alekhine in 1927, and Alekhine, allowing for a brief interlude with Max Euwe, held it until his death in 1946.

A champion dying with the crown created a problem nobody had faced before. FIDE, the international federation founded in Paris in 1924, stepped in and organised a five-player tournament across The Hague and Moscow in 1948. Mikhail Botvinnik won it, and from that moment the championship became a public, regulated institution run by FIDE rather than a private arrangement between gentlemen.

It also became Soviet property. Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian and Spassky passed the title between themselves for twenty-four years, supported by a state system that treated chess as a science and its champions as national assets. A complete record of every championship cycle is kept at stauntonchess.com.

1972: Fischer, Reykjavik and the Cold War Board

Then came Bobby Fischer. In the summer of 1972, in a sports hall in Reykjavik, the American beat Boris Spassky 12.5 to 8.5 and ended the Soviet run at a stroke. It was front-page news on both sides of the Iron Curtain, a Cold War fought over sixty-four squares, and it remains the most famous chess match ever played. The game-by-game account at stauntonchess.com captures how close the whole thing came to collapse before a single pawn moved.

Fischer never defended the title. He forfeited it to Anatoly Karpov in 1975 over a dispute about match conditions, and Karpov spent a decade proving he was no paper champion. His true rival arrived in the form of Garry Kasparov. The two men played five championship matches between 1984 and 1990, including a first contest so gruelling it was abandoned after 48 games without a result.

Kasparov won the rematch in 1985 at the age of twenty-two, the youngest world champion the game had seen. The World Chess Hall of Fame, fittingly based in St Louis where Steinitz once played, preserves the story of both men's careers.

The Berlin Wall and the Carlsen Decade

Kasparov ruled until 2000, when Vladimir Kramnik produced one of the great feats of match preparation. He revived the Berlin Defence, a nineteenth-century opening so solid that Kasparov never broke through it across the entire match. Players still call it the Berlin Wall. Kramnik won in London without losing a single game.

The title had fractured in 1993, when Kasparov played his championship matches outside FIDE, and for thirteen years the chess world had two rival champions. Reunification came in 2006, and in 2007 Viswanathan Anand of India took the undisputed crown, holding it until 2013. What followed was the Carlsen decade: the Norwegian won the title in Chennai in 2013 and defended it four times, including the longest game in championship history, 136 moves against Ian Nepomniachtchi in Dubai in 2021.

Then Carlsen did something no reigning champion had done since Fischer. In 2023 he simply declined to defend, and Ding Liren of China won the vacated title. The crown was on the move again.

Singapore, 2024: Gukesh and the Set That Never Changed

In December 2024, eighteen-year-old Gukesh Dommaraju of India defeated Ding Liren in Singapore to become the youngest undisputed World Chess Champion in history. The match was level going into the final classical game, and it turned on a single moment: Ding, in a drawn endgame, made one careless exchange and the title changed hands. The move-by-move story is at stauntonchess.com.

The pieces Gukesh touched that day were, in every line and proportion, the same design Steinitz and Zukertort played with in 1886. The Staunton pattern was created by Jaques of London in 1849, registered that same year by Nathaniel Cook, who worked alongside Jaques to bring it to market, and named in honour of Howard Staunton, the strongest English player of his day. The FIDE Handbook specifies the Staunton pattern for competition play to this day, which means a design from a London workshop has outlasted empires, federations and every champion who ever sat behind it.

In our workshop the knight is still known as the hard piece, because every mane is finished by hand and no two ever leave the bench quite identical. The chess sets we make today, from club boards to luxury chess sets, follow the same 1849 pattern. Seventeen or eighteen champions. One design. That is the quiet thread running through 140 years of the hardest game in the world.

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