The first official world championship is generally regarded to have been the match in 1886, then the two leading players in Europe, William Steinitz and Johann Zukertort, which was won by Steinitz.
From 1886 to 1946, the champions played matches where any challenger had first to raise a sizable stake and then defeat the champion in a match in order to become the new world champion.
From 1948 to 1993, the championship was organized by FIDE, the world chess federation.
In 1993, the reigning champion (Garry Kasparov) broke away from FIDE, leading to the creation of two rival championships. This situation remained until 2006, when the title was unified at the World Chess Championship 2006. The current world champion Viswanathan Anand won the World Chess Championship tournament 2007. He successfully defended his title against former world champion Vladimir Kramnik in the World Chess Championship 2008, and again against the challenger Veselin Topalov in the World Chess Championship 2010. In 2012 he won his currently last title match against Boris Gelfand.
Pre-Official World Champions
We reagard the following players as pre-offical World Champions. The reasons for this are that they've dominated the tournaments at their time or defeated their predecessor in a match. Before these players there were just no tournaments existing.
The pre-official World Champions are:
- Howard Staunton
- Adolf Anderssen
- Paul Morphy
Official World Champions
- Wilhelm Steinitz
- Emanuel Lasker
- Jose Raul Capablanca
- Alexander Alekhine
- Max Euwe
- Mikhail Botvinnik
- Vasily Smyslov
- Mikhail Tal
- Tigran Petrosjan
- Boris Spassky
- Robert James (Bobby) Fischer
- Anatoly Karpov
- Garry Kasparov
- Alexander Khalifman
- Ruslan Ponomariov
- Rustam Kasimdzhanov
- Vesselin Topalov
- Vladimir Kramnik
- Viswanathan Anand
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Last Updated on Saturday, 20 October 2012 01:20