Reader's Digest Australia Feb/Mar 2026

Chess, Mate? 1 Game on! About 1 in 5 Americans play chess at least occasionally. The site chess.com hosts some 30 million matches every day and offers tips to help players at all levels improve. More than 600 million adults play worldwide. 2 Historically, Russia (or the Soviet Union) has had many of the world’s strongest chess players. From 1927 to 1990, only two World Championships weren’t won by a Soviet, and in a 1970 competition popularly known as USSR vs. the Rest of the World, the USSR won. But things are evening out. The current world champion, Gukesh Dommaraju, is Indian, and Magnus Carlsen of Norway has been the highest-rated player during the last decade. Six of the current BY Michael Goodman illustration by Serge Bloch reader ’ s digest 32   february/march 2026 13 THINGS top 20 players in the world are American. 3 You win the game by checkmating your opponent. But among top players, checkmate is rare since they can see far enough ahead to know when they are going to lose, at which point they usually resign. Players earn ratings based on their performance in tournaments. Typical club players have 1300 to 1500 rating points. Those rated higher than 2200 are masters, and most grandmasters have more than 2500 rating points. 4 Certain series of moves are named for the places where they were first played or popularized: the Vienna Game, the Danish Gambit, the London System, the Sicilian Defense and the Yugoslav Attack, among others. But the Queen’s Gambit has nothing to do with Queens, New York. The name comes from the tactic itself, in which a player purposefully sacrifices a pawn on the queen’s side. 5 Interest in chess has surged since 2020, partly thanks to the popularity of the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit , which was released that year. But the ability to play online (especially during the pandemic) certainly contributed. The number of active users of chess.com doubled from Octo- ber 2020 to April 2022. Chess hadn’t captured so much attention from the general public since 1972, when American Bobby Fischer became world champion after defeating Soviet star Boris Spassky at the height of the Cold War. 6 One of the oldest surviving chess sets is the Lewis Chessmen, named for the island off Scotland where it was found. The set’s 900-year-old pieces feature emphatic facial expressions. The British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland house the Lewis Chessmen and show close-ups on their websites. 7 The piece we call a knight is called a springer (“jumper”) in German, and their word for pawn translates as “farmer.” In French, the bishop is known as a “jester.” In Russian, it’s called an “elephant.” (However, in Hindi, the rook is the “elephant.”) The rook is a “chariot” in Icelandic and in Bulgarian, it’s a “cannon.” In Italian, the queen is known as “the lady,” but Estonians refer to her as a “flag.” 8 Now the strongest piece, the queen used to be one of the weakest. She became more powerful during the Middle Ages as her range of possible moves expanded. One theory is that Spain’s Queen Isabella helped inspire this shift. Today, the queen can move any number of squares readersdigest.com.au     33 13 Things