Queens Problem

Perhaps this title makes you think of Queen Elizabeth or maybe the Alice in Wonderland character, but this time, we are talking about chess! 

According to the website PopSci:

"Almost nothing looks more orderly than chess pieces before a match starts. The first move, however, begins a spiral into chaos. After both players move, 400 possible board setups exist. After the second pair of turns, there are 197,742 possible games, and after three moves, 121 million. At every turn, players chart a progressively more distinctive path, and each game evolves into one that has probably never been played before."

Rather than attempt to write about so many moves individually--a truly impossible feat!--we will be focusing on the number of moves we can make with the Queen. We turn WholesaleChess to break down this complicated, useful, and powerful piece.

Firstly, let's talk about how the queen operates:

"The queen chess piece is like a combination of the Rook and Bishop chess pieces. Each player starts out with one Queen piece (although any pawn that makes it to the other side of the board can be traded in for another queen, which is why some chess sets come with extra queens).  The Queen can move forward or diagonal in any direction. Here are a few notes:

• The queen can move in any direction on a straight or diagonal path.
• The queen cannot "jump" over any piece on the board, so its movements are restricted to any direction of unoccupied squares.
• The queen can be used to capture any of your opponent's pieces on the board."

Secondly, Chess.com gives us an in-depth look at all the tips and tricks you can use during a game to win using using your Queen.

For even more fun chess fun facts, you should check out TheChessWorld. Here are a few of the facts they give us:

• The longest chess game theoretically possible is 5,949 moves.
• Blathy, Otto (1860-1939), credited for creating the longest Chess Problem, mate in 290 moves.
• The worst performance by a player was Macleod of Canada who lost 31 games in the New York double-round robin of 1889.
• In 1985, Eric Knoppert played 500 games of 10-minute Chess in 68 hours.
• About 600,000,000 (Six hundred million) people know how to play chess worldwide!