Undisputed world champions 1886-1993. FIDE world champions 1993-2006. Undisputed world champions 2006-present. World Chess Championship. The World Chess Championship (sometimes abbreviated as WCC) is played to determine the World Champion in chess.
All people are eligible to contest this title. The official world championship is generally regarded to have begun in 1886, when the two leading players in Europe and the United States, Johann Zukertort and Wilhelm Steinitz respectively, played a match. From 1886 to 1946, the champion set the terms, requiring any challenger to raise a sizable stake and defeat the champion in a match in order to become the new world champion.
From 1948 to 1993, the championship was administered by FIDE, the World Chess Federation. Computers choose: who was the strongest player? Computer Analysis of World Chess Champions By Matej Guid and Ivan Bratko University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
This article is based on a paper by the same authors published in the ICGA Journal; full reference is given below. Who is the best chess player of all time? Chess players are often interested in this question to which there is no well founded, objective answer, because it requires a comparison between chess players of different eras who never met across the board. With the emergence of high-quality chess programs a possibility of such an objective comparison arises. Edo Historical Chess Ratings.
The History of the World Chess Championship. In the 1870s, a Polish immigrant to the United Kingdom named Johannes Zukertort was gaining worldwide attention.
By the 1880s many believed that he had surpassed Steinitz, which was further confirmed when Zukertort won the London tournament of 1883, defeating nearly every leading player in the world, finishing three points above second-place Steinitz. The stage was finally set for the first official World Chess Championship. So who was better, really? In 1886 these two masters settled the question in the only acceptable way: they played a long chess match.