fun facts

Initially, the Queen could only move one square at a time, diagonally. Later, she could move two squares at a time, diagonally. It wasn’t until Reconquista Spain, with its powerful queen Isabella, that the Queen became the strongest piece on the board.
The number of possibilities of a Knight's tour is over 122 million.
During World War II, some of the top Chess players were also code breakers. British masters Harry Golombek, Stuart Milner-Barry and H. O'D. Alexander was on the teamwhich broke the Nazi Enigma code.
The word "Checkmate" in Chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means"the King is dead."
The longest chess game theoretically possible is 5,949 moves.
A computer called DeepThought became the first computer to beat an international grandmaster in November 1988, Long Beach, California.
The folding chessboard was invented by a priest who was forbidden to play chess. The priest found a way around it by making a folding chessboard. When folded together and put ona bookshelf, it simply lookslike two books.
If you put one grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on, how many grains of wheat do you need to put on the 64th square? The answer is 9,223,372,036,8 54,775,808(appr oximately 9.22x10 18 ) grains of wheat.