A Fast Paced History of Chess

This video, from Youtube channel 'The History Guy' (subtitled 'History Deserves to Be Remembered'; currently 853K subscribers), starts,

Playing games is big business. According to 'Business Insider', the worldwide video gaming industry earned about $120 billion in revenue in 2018. The web site 'Statista' values the worldwide boardgaming industry at $7.5 billion. And it's not exactly a new thing -- the same web site values the industry around the game of chess, more than a millennium old, at around $190 million. A 2012 survey found that some 605 million people in the world still play chess on a regular basis.

Although that last statistic is often called into question, let's forget about it for a moment and watch the clip.

A Brief History of Chess (14:07) • '[Published on] Sep 4, 2020'

The video's description repeats that last statistic, then launches into the history.

A 2012 survey found that 605 million people play chess regularly, nearly 1500 years after the game was first played. The names of the pieces and the moves may have changed, but the rules that developed over a millennium and a half represent a culmination of many cultures and players that helped to develop the Game of Kings. The forgotten history of the game of chess deserves to be remembered.

Forgotten history? The video is a fast paced summary of chess's development that crams dozens (hundreds?) of facts into a little more than ten minutes.

In last month's featured video on this blog, Chess Movie 2020 (August 2020), I summarized some of the many comments. I could have done the same for the more than 800 comments against 'A Brief History', but time ran out. Maybe later...