AJ Chess Academy

04/08/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1E45uCECR5/

International Chess Federation Adds Race Car Piece https://theonion.com/international-chess-federation-adds-race-car-piece/

02/14/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1b3bZCx8vR/

I've been playing chess since the 7th grade and never really questioned it, but for some reason today, I decided to look into this matter.

Apparently the “slit” in the chess bishop piece isn’t just a random design—it’s a symbolic nod to both its religious origins and its evolution in chess history. Originally, the piece represented a bishop wearing a mitre, which is why it had that split in the middle. That slit mimicked the mitre’s two points or folds.

But wait, there's more!

After Howard Staunton standardized chess pieces in the mid-1800s, the bishop’s design shifted slightly: the cut moved from the center to the side, giving it a more dynamic look. This change was more than aesthetic as it symbolically tied the piece to a war elephant, which earlier chess versions in India and Persia used for the piece.

So now the bishop represents both a mitre-wearing cleric and, subtly, a mounted war elephant heading into battle.

01/07/2026

Fairer games by a starting re-arrangement?

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1D1cmEohkx/

Chess can be improved by rearranging the positions of the starting pieces to produce a more difficult or fairer game, a physicist has found.

A standard game of chess always starts with the pieces at the back of the board arranged with an element of symmetry. Starting from the outside, for both white and black, are pairs of rooks, knights and bishops, with a king and queen in the middle. But because this arrangement is fixed, top chess players can memorise the best moves to open a game of chess, which can lead to predictable and boring matches.

In the 1990s, the late chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer proposed a variant of the game that reduced this reliance on memory. Fischer suggested effectively randomising the starting positions of the pieces at the back of the board – apart from basic rules dictating where the bishops, rooks and kings must be relative to each other – with both white and black pieces taking on the same random arrangement.

This format, called Chess960 for the number of possible starting positions, has recently ballooned in popularity, with players including former world champion Magnus Carlsen taking part in tournaments to better test their chess skills.

Read more here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2509800-chess-can-be-made-fairer-by-rearranging-the-pieces/

Image: Richard Levine/Alamy

12/08/2025

Congratz to Aleah for her big win!

10/22/2025

https://apnews.com/article/daniel-naroditsky-died-chess-impact-ff0ddf2e286e862bfbf2af593d02491d

Chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky has died at the age of 29. He leaves behind a legacy as a standard-bearer in the world of competitive chess that flourished during the COVID-19 pandemic.

10/16/2025

10/07/2025

"Who" would you add?