An etymology of the openings, hung like an exhibition.
Priests, sea captains, refugees. The openings outlived them all.
Named for Ruy López de Segura, the sixteenth-century Spanish priest who analyzed 3.Bb5 in his 1561 treatise.
López was a churchman from Zafra whose book also advised seating your opponent with the sun in his eyes. Four and a half centuries on, masters still open his way.
Named for Captain William Davies Evans, the Welsh sea captain who introduced 4.b4 in the 1820s.
Evans commanded mail ships between Britain and Ireland and is also credited with a system of colored lights for vessels at night. His pawn offer beat the best players in London, and kept his name.
Named for Horatio Caro and Marcus Kann, who analyzed 1…c6 together in the 1880s.
Caro was an Englishman playing in Berlin; Kann was a Viennese master. They published their analysis in 1886, and the hyphen has held the partnership together ever since.
Named for Henry Edward Bird, the English master who opened 1.f4 for half a century.
Bird was a London accountant who played tournament chess from the 1850s into the 1890s and answered the Ruy López with his own name too — Bird's Defense. The flank opening was simply how he began.
Named for Alexander Alekhine, the fourth world champion, who sprang 1…Nf6 on the masters at Budapest in 1921.
Inviting White's pawns forward so they could be attacked later was close to heresy in 1921. Alekhine did it anyway, and the defense has carried his name ever since.
Named for Ernst Grünfeld, the Viennese master who introduced 3…d5 in 1922.
Grünfeld, an opening theorist said to keep one of the great chess libraries of his day, gave the counter-punching defense its debut in 1922 — Alekhine was among its first victims.
Aron Nimzowitsch's name, clipped to "Nimzo", grafted onto the Indian family of defenses.
Nimzowitsch, the great hypermodern, taught that a center could be controlled from a distance and a knight tamed by a pin. The defense fuses his name with the Indian family it grew from.
Named for Richard Réti, the hypermodern who attacked the center from the wings.
At New York 1924 Réti used his opening to beat Capablanca — the world champion's first loss in eight years. Nobody argued about what to call the opening after that.
Named for Miguel Najdorf, the Polish-Argentine grandmaster who made 5…a6 a way of life.
Najdorf was in Buenos Aires with the Polish team when the war began in 1939, and never went home. The sharpest main line in the Sicilian carries the name he carried across the Atlantic.
Named for Henri Grob, the Swiss master who took 1.g4 seriously enough to analyze it for decades.
Grob, a portrait painter by profession, tested his move in hundreds of correspondence games with readers of his newspaper column. Almost nobody else believed in it. He didn't mind.
Correspondence matches, tournament halls, and one commissioned tribute.
Named for Sicily — Italian masters, the Sicilian priest Pietro Carrera among them, were analyzing 1…c5 four centuries ago.
English writers fixed the name in the early nineteenth century, translating an old Italian manuscript's "il gioco siciliano" — the Sicilian game. It is now the most popular reply to 1.e4 in chess.
Named for the Netherlands — Elias Stein, settled in The Hague, recommended 1…f5 as Black's best answer to 1.d4 in 1789.
Stein taught the game at The Hague, princes of the House of Orange among his pupils, and his recommendation fastened the country's name to Black's most combative reply to 1.d4.
Named for Scotland, after the Edinburgh Chess Club's correspondence match against London, begun in 1824.
The moves traveled between the two cities by post, a single game stretching across years. Edinburgh won the match, and 3.d4 has been Scotch — the old adjective for Scottish — ever since.
Named for France, after Paris beat London with 1…e6 in a correspondence match begun in 1834.
The Parisians trusted the cramped, coiled pawn chain and won with it. The victory fastened their country's name to the defense for good.
Named for England — Howard Staunton opened 1.c4 against Saint-Amant in their 1843 match, and the move took his country's name.
Staunton was the strongest player of his day, and 1.c4 was considered an eccentricity. A century later the world champions adopted it. The Englishman was early, not wrong.
From the "Indian" defenses — the fianchetto systems John Cochrane met in Calcutta in the 1850s, above all from Moheschunder Bannerjee.
European theory called any early fianchetto "Indian" for decades afterward. This one belongs to the king's side of the board, and grew into the fiercest member of the family.
Named for the Nordic masters who took up 1…d5 in the late nineteenth century — before that it was plain Center Counter.
The defense appears in the oldest surviving game of modern chess, recorded in Valencia around 1475. It waited four hundred years for Scandinavian analysis to make it respectable — and to rename it.
Named for the London tournament of 1922, where the sturdy Bf4 setup kept appearing on the top boards.
Masters at London 1922 leaned on the setup game after game, and the city's name stuck. A century on, it is everywhere club chess is played.
Named for Catalonia — the organizers of Barcelona 1929 asked Savielly Tartakower for an opening honoring the region.
Tartakower answered with queen's-pawn solidity wearing a fianchettoed edge. The commission has outlived the tournament by nearly a century.
One name is not a person or a place — just Italian, for how the game feels.
From the Italian for "quiet game" — giuoco is an old spelling of gioco.
Italians were bringing the bishop to c4 in the sixteenth century, and the name is simply a description: development first, violence deferred. The oldest openings have the calmest names.
And two are pictures: one from the kitchen, one from the night sky.
From the Italian fegatello — a morsel of liver — the old idiom being that the defender ends up "dead as a piece of liver."
Italian masters were recording the knight sacrifice on f7 four hundred years ago, kitchen name and all. Both languages promise the same thing: the king comes to the middle, and gets cooked.
Named for the constellation Draco — Fyodor Dus-Chotimirsky saw the dragon in Black's kingside pawn chain.
Dus-Chotimirsky, a Russian master studying astronomy at the time, said the pawns from d6 to h7 traced the same line as the stars of Draco. The fiercest branch of the Sicilian kept his astronomer's name for it.