Talk:List of World Chess Champions

Unjustified material[change source]

To be a champion, a player must have won some critical test, such as a match against an esteemed opponent. Almost all the early names fail this test, and must come out. In some cases we know almost nothing about them except for their name. My authorities are the Oxford Companion to Chess by Hooper & Whyld, and the History of chess by Murray.. Macdonald-ross (talk) 08:46, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect the data in this list is heavily dependent on the data from en.wiki's article where the "unofficial" champions are also listed. The Rambling Man (talk) 08:55, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that's right. To give one example, we know nothing about Vicent except a later work mentions he wrote the first printed book on chess, not a single copy of which has survived! I devised the "esteemed players" to keep most of the names on board in a form which is unlikely to be disputed. Macdonald-ross (talk) 10:03, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

List?[change source]

This is really a List page with a little bit of commentary, so I'm thinking it should be retitled 'List of chess world champions'. Macdonald-ross (talk) 09:51, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't the winner referred to as a World Chess Champion? Note that enWP doesn't actually have a similar article, they choose to list the championships instead, with the winners for each championship listed within the title. Griff (talk) 05:23, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I am aware of that! No, because the World Championship begins with Steinitz. I wanted to include some of the run-up to the official world championship. About most of the early players we don't know enough (though some did make claims to be the champion). With some, they played only in their home city as far as we know. Sometimes we have the scores of only a few games. Italy, for example, was not a country in the modern sense of the word. It had a patchwork of city states with different rulers unified by culture. In addition one has to remember that in many places people spoke local languages, so the world was more divided in that sense in 1500 (say). Anyway, the list is well supported by the sources.

I can offer you a parallel: the history of boxing or wrestling. The history of boxing is especially fascinating. Macdonald-ross (talk) 05:39, 7 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]