Chess Champions in History

Strong chess champions use other parts of their brain as normal club players. This was researched and established at the university in Konstanz, Germany.

They proved that chess masters mostly rely on their memory while normal amateur players use other parts of their brain that have the task of judging and analyzing new situations. Chess masters with higher Elo Rating used more often their memory banks than masters with lower rating.

The process to remember is faster compared to judging, analyzing and pondering. This explains why a master is much quicker coming up with a good move as he relies on his memory banks where he has stored thousands of chess ideas, chess variations and chess positions from his past games. Whereas the amateur player is always confronted with a new position which he has to analyze and judge again from scratch. This takes a lot of time.

This leads to the conclusion that people, who have a photographic memory should be able to store a lot more chess ideas than normal people. If this is so, only people with excellent memory can become chess champions because this natural advantage (for example: photographic memory) can not be overcome with training. They all do training but only some of them have the abilities to become great players.

Former world chess champion, Tigran Petrosian

Classical World Champions

	Name	Year	Country	Age
1	Wilhelm Steinitz	1886–1894	Austria-Hungary/United States	50–58
2	Emanuel Lasker	1894–1921	Germany	26–53
3	José Raúl Capablanca	1921–1927	Cuba	33–39
4	Alexander Alekhine	1927–1935 1937–1946	Russia	35–43 45–54
5	Max Euwe	1935–1937		34–36
6	Mikhail Botvinnik	1948–1957 1958–1960 1961–1963	Soviet Union/Russia	37–46 47–49 50–52
7	Vasily Smyslov	1957–1958	Russia	36
8	Mikhail Tal	1960–1961	Latvia	24
9	Tigran Petrosian	1963–1969	Soviet Union/Armenia	34–40
10	Boris Spassky	1969–1972	Soviet Union/Russia	32–35
11	Robert J. Fischer	1972–1975	United States	29–32
12	Anatoly Karpov	1975–1985	Soviet Union/Russia	24–34
13	Garry Kasparov	1985–2000	Soviet Union/Russia	22–30
14	Vladimir Kramnik	2000–2006	Russia	31

Chess-Playing Robot – The Mechanical Turk

Chess-Champions

FIDE World Champions 1993–2006

	Name	Year	Country	Approx. Age
13	Anatoly Karpov	1993–1999	Russia	42–48
14	Alexander Khalifman	1999–2000	Russia	33
15	Viswanathan Anand	2000–2002	India	31–33
16	Ruslan Ponomariov	2002–2004	Ukraine	19–21
17	Rustam Kasimdzhanov	2004–2005	Uzbekistan	25
18	Veselin Topalov	2005–2006	Bulgaria	30

World Champions 2006–present

	Name	Year	Country	Approx. Age
19/14	Vladimir Kramnik	2006–2007	Russia	31
15	Viswanathan Anand	2007–present	India	38

Read more about World Chess Championships and Chess Matches in History!

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