Try me Welcome toe watch Mojo.

And today we're counting down our picks for the top 10 mind blowing facts about chess in this position.

King has no safe squares to move, but it's hoped that mental exercise, like chess, will checkmate the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

Enough chances.

Let's play for this list.

We'll be looking at the most fascinating fax about the game of chess.

How close are you to becoming a grand master?

Let us know.

In the comments below Number 10, the pieces look like they do for a reason.

Many people the world over will recognize the general.

The variable physical design of chess pieces, pawns, air, usually little nubby things.

Nights are horse heads.

Bishops have a rounded headgear, rooks are castle towers, and the king and queen have their respective crowns.

Like I said, the queen ain't no bitch.

She got all the moves.

According to various explanations, the reason these pieces don't represent actual people is due to certain traditions of Islam.

Since those beliefs didn't allow for representations of people, the designs were altered to make them appear mawr vague and universal.

When chess finally reached Western Europe around the ninth century, the pieces remained unchanged.

Number nine, it might help with memory function.

Alzheimer's is one of the worst diseases that a human being can suffer from.

I use this yellow yellow thingy to market, so I don't have to read the same line over and over and over and over again.

Luckily, there are ways to mitigate it like playing chess.

Lots of scientific research has been undertaken regarding the relationship between chess and memory function.

In 2003, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that chess and other similar brain activities helped delay the onset of Alzheimer's.

Learning the game of chess or playing the game of chess has at least shown that over the age of 75 that it may in fact delay the progression of such a thing.

Stanford University's Professor Abraham Borghi's also recommends exercising the brain to prevent dementia illness, and that there may come a day quote when doctors recommend a game of chess along with physical exercise and a healthy diet.

Research has shown that the memory can begin to fade from the age of 20 but it's hoped that mental exercise like chess will checkmate the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

Number eight Queen Isabella changed the game.

Like all games, the rules of chess are fluid and ever changing.

The rules we know today weren't standardized until the 19th century, and the game had changed numerous times before that before the late 14 hundreds.

The male queen equivalent could only move one or two squares at a time, much like the King, that is, until Isabella, the first of Castell E, cannot ignore the verdict of my council.

Surely you can do anything you want.

How little, you know, ruling over Spain with her husband, King Ferdinand, The second, Isabella became the first queen of Spain and helped finance Christopher Columbus's fateful voyage to the New World.

According to chess historian Hobart Festival, Queen Isabella's power and influence altered the rules of chess, turning the mail piece into a female queen and allowing it to move any distance in any direction.

Number seven checkmate has a cool origin story.

Checkmate.

The terminology of chess may sound different to our modern years.

What the heck do check and checkmate even mean?

While the earliest forms of chess ended on Lee after the king was physically captured.

After a couple of 100 years, the Persians changed the ending to a checkmate, which is when the king is cornered by the opponent's pieces.

The word checkmate is sourced from numerous Persian and Arabic phrases.

It may derive from the Persian phrase Shab mocked, meaning the king is helpless.

Do you see it now, or should we finish this on the board?

It may also derive from Arabic with Sheikh, meaning monarch and Mott, meaning dead or helpless.

Therefore, sheep Mott translates to the monarch is dead or helpless.

Bishop to Bishop eight.

Discovered, check And incidentally, Mate number six fool's mate can end you quickly.

Chasse is a very complex game.

When played at the highest level.

A game can take numerous hours to finish.

It's been five folks.

Perhaps we should.

The journal.

It's also possible, although exceedingly unlikely, for the black player to checkmate the white in just two moves.

This infamous trap is called the Fool's Mate.

It's performed by moving the e pawn, so the Queen Congar O to H four.

However, this is only possible if the white player moves their pawns toe F three or four and G four, opening up a devastating line of attack and allowing the Black Queen to trap the white king.

In this position, the king has no safe squares to move.

There are no pieces that could interpose or block the queen from checking the king, and there actually are no pieces that can capture the checking piece or capture the queen.

It's presumably so named because the white player has to be a fool to allow it to happen.

Number five, there are over 1000 different openings.

It's no secret that Chest takes a very long time to master, owing to its complexity.

That isn't very surprising when one considers that there are over 1000 different opening variations alone.

In fact, the Oxford Companion to Chest lists an unbelievable 1327 different openings and variants.

Originally published in 1984 by the Oxford University Press, the Oxford Companion to Chess was written by chess masters historians and researchers David Vincent Hooper and Ken Wild.

Some of the more well known openings include Open Game, the Bishops Opening The King and Queen's Gambit and Petrov's Defense, just to name five of the 1327 Show Me Not Now, Let's play again.

Number four Chess began in India.

Chess is a very old game, and it has its roots in the Gupta empire.

Chess was invented in India somewhere around 600 a.

D.

A gigantic chessboard was constructed in fact, for secret, which was the capital a long time ago.

Gupta was an ancient Indian empire that covered much of the Indian subcontinent from the third to sixth centuries.

It was during this rain sometime around the sixth century that chess was created in northwest India with its spread to sustain it Persia, it acquired its current name and terminology.

Chess derived from SHAR, meaning king and checkmate from Sharm Ott or the King is helpless.

It was known as chattering gah, and its rules have been lost to history.

What we do know is that chattering gah means four divisions and said divisions were composed of the infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariot tree way also know that it was played on an eight by eight checkerboard known as an Ashtabula.

Number three.

There are billions of potential play combinations.

This ain't checkers.

You want my king, you've got to come get my king.

All these other pieces of just the means to do it.

If you thought 1000 different openings was difficult in complex, then you haven't heard anything yet.

Chess can go any number of ways.

Roughly 300 billion ways, to be exact.

And that's just in the first four moves.

Yes, the different play combinations are so staggering that there are an estimated 319 billion different combinations and positions in the first four moves of chess alone.

But what play never play the board.

Always the man you gotta play the man playing the board.

Play me.

I'm your opponent.

You have to beat me, not the board beat me.

But that's not all.

In theory, the longest possible chess match would last 5949 moves, we say in theory, because that would take an astoundingly long time to complete.

So move.

Okay, that's a good move.

I can't believe it.

I'm losing to a rug.

The longest chest match in history took place in Belgrade in 1989 and lasted just 269 moves that game alone took just over 20 hours to complete number two.

The Shannon number will blow your mind.

And if you thought that was crazy, just wait until you hear the Shannon number.

If there are over 300 billion different combinations in the first four moves, then just how many unique total combinations can there be?

The answer is almost literally unimaginable.

The Shannon number, devised by mathematician Claude Shannon, places the conservative lower bound of chess at 10 to the power of 120 unique variations.

That's more than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is estimated at 10 to the power of 80.

Does that even make sense?

With that?

Said the 10 to the power of 120 Number takes into account ridiculous moves that no sensible player would make when accounting for sensible games.

The number is closer to 10 to the power of 40.

Not that that is any less staggering.

It looks like you're right, marries on thank you for a very enjoyable game.

Thank you.

Before we unveil our topic, here are a few honorable mentions.

The second book ever printed in English, was about chess.

The etymology of rookie may come from the RUC.

The first modern board was created in Europe in the 11th century.

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Number one.

The folding board may have been for stealth folding chessboards air quite common today, the board's fold perfectly down the middle, and the pieces are typically held within the folded halves.

This allows for easy carrying and storage, and it's also great for hiding the chess set from prying eyes.

Legend has it that the folding chessboard was invented back in the early 12th century in a time when chess was forbidden in the church.

Ah, chess loving priest supposedly defied the rules and created a secret chessboard that could fold in half and be stored on a shelf where it would look like to nondescript books.

The idea, obviously caught on because people have been making folding chess sets for the last 900 years, do you agree with our picks?

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