World Chess Championship Trivia
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58 free World Chess Championship trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This World Chess Championship trivia quiz walks the whole line of champions, from the 1886 Steinitz–Zukertort match through Lasker's 27-year reign, Capablanca and Alekhine, the FIDE era of Botvinnik, Tal and Petrosian, and on to Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Anand, Carlsen, Ding Liren and Gukesh Dommaraju. Along the way it stops at the strange moments: the forfeited game 2 in Reykjavík, the blueberry yogurt in Baguio, the 48-game match that FIDE simply called off, and the twelve straight draws in London in 2018. It also covers how the title actually works: the Candidates, the 1993 split and 2006 reunification, the return-match clause, prize funds, and the Women's World Championship from Vera Menchik to Ju Wenjun. Roughly a third of the questions are warm-ups any chess fan can get; the rest are for people who know their Timman from their Janowski. If you want the wider game, try our general chess trivia page too. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's championship pages and the match reports they cite, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Whom did Wilhelm Steinitz beat in the 1886 match recognised as the first world championship?
Johannes Zukertort
Johannes Zukertort won four of the first five games in New York, then wilted as the match moved on to St. Louis and New Orleans, losing by ten wins to five.
Q 02Which champion held the world chess title longest, for 27 years?
Emanuel Lasker
Emanuel Lasker reigned from 1894 to 1921. After beating Steinitz again in 1897 he went ten years without a title match, then faced four challengers in four years.
Q 03Which reigning champion died in 1946, leaving the title vacant and prompting FIDE to take over?
Alexander Alekhine
Alexander Alekhine was found dead in a hotel room in Portugal while arranging a title match with Botvinnik. He is the only champion to have died holding the title.
Q 04The 1948 tournament for the vacant world chess title began in The Hague and finished in which city?
Moscow
Moscow. Five players took part after Reuben Fine declined his place, and Botvinnik won by three clear points, the first of the Soviet champions who held the title until 1972.
Q 05Under which new body did Kasparov and Short play their 1993 match after breaking from FIDE?
Professional Chess Association
Professional Chess Association. FIDE answered by stripping Kasparov of its title and staging a rival match, which left chess with two world champions at once.
Q 06The 2006 World Chess Championship match nearly collapsed in a row over one player's frequent visits to where?
His private bathroom
His private bathroom was the one place not under surveillance, so the rival camp voiced suspicion; when officials closed it, he forfeited game five in protest, yet still won the match in tiebreaks.
Q 07What forced the defending champion into a 40-hour road trip to reach the 2010 World Chess Championship in Sofia?
A volcanic ash cloud
A volcanic ash cloud from Iceland grounded Europe's flights, so the champion's team drove from Frankfurt to Sofia; granted just one extra day, he lost the first game but still kept his title.
Q 08Who defeated Ding Liren in the 2024 match to become world chess champion?
Gukesh Dommaraju
Gukesh Dommaraju had earned the match in Toronto, where his final-round draw won the Candidates only because a rival let a winning position slip.
Q 09An 18-year-old became the youngest undisputed world chess champion in 2024 after the title-holder did what in game 14?
Blundered a drawn endgame
Blundered a drawn endgame: Ding Liren offered a rook swap that let his challenger force a winning pawn ending, losing the title in a game he could have held to reach tiebreaks.
Q 10Which city hosted the 2024 World Chess Championship match?
Singapore
Singapore was chosen by FIDE over two rival bids from India, New Delhi and Chennai, so the Indian challenger had to chase the title away from home.
Q 11Which country gained its first open world chess champion in 2023?
China
China got its first open world champion the hard way: after a 7–7 tie, Ding Liren turned down a draw by repetition in the last rapid tiebreak game and won it with Black.
Q 12Why was the 2023 world championship contested by the top two Candidates finishers?
The title-holder declined to defend it
The title-holder declined to defend it: Magnus Carlsen, champion since 2013, said he had no inclination to play another title match, so he gave up the crown without ever losing it.
Q 13Magnus Carlsen, who first won the world chess title in 2013, represents which country?
Norway
Q 21In which city did Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky in the 1972 'Match of the Century'?
Reykjavík
Reykjavík almost hosted no match at all: Fischer skipped the opening ceremony and landed in Iceland only hours before he would have been forfeited.
Q 22A phone call from which US official helped persuade Fischer to play the 1972 match?
Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's national security adviser, made the call as Fischer held out, a sign of the Cold War stakes: Soviet players had held the title without a break since 1948.
Q 23How did financier Jim Slater get Bobby Fischer to the board in 1972?
Doubled the prize fund
Norway's Carlsen took the title at 22, three years after walking out of the previous championship cycle, which he said was not "sufficiently modern and fair".
Q 14Who won the eight-player double round-robin tournament in Mexico in 2007 to become world champion?
Viswanathan Anand
Viswanathan Anand finished a full point clear without losing a game, then defended the title head-to-head in 2008 against the champion he had displaced.
Q 15What was unprecedented about the classical portion of the 2018 championship match in London?
All twelve games were drawn
All twelve games were drawn, so the title came down to a rapid tiebreak, where Carlsen won three straight games to stay champion.
Q 16Which American challenged Carlsen for the title in London in 2018?
Fabiano Caruana
Fabiano Caruana was the first American to challenge for the undisputed title since Bobby Fischer in 1972, though he had spent a decade representing Italy before switching back in 2015.
Q 17Who won the eighth game of the 2016 match in New York to take a lead over Carlsen?
Sergey Karjakin
Sergey Karjakin won it with Black, and a rattled Carlsen left the press conference before it began, earning a fine; the champion levelled in game ten and won the rapid tiebreak.
Q 18Who lost a 136-move game to Carlsen in 2021, the longest in World Chess Championship history?
Ian Nepomniachtchi
Ian Nepomniachtchi never recovered from the defeat: after five straight draws to open the match, he lost three of the next five games.
Q 19The 2021 championship match was staged inside which international event?
Expo 2020 in Dubai
Expo 2020 in Dubai was itself running a year late because of the pandemic, which had also pushed the title match back from 2020, so the two ended up under one roof.
Q 20In the 1978 World Chess Championship match, the challenger accused a man on the champion's team of trying to do what?
Hypnotise him
Hypnotise him: the champion's delegation included a Soviet psychologist and hypnotherapist, Dr Zukhar, who sat near the front and stared at the challenger during play.
He doubled the prize fund by adding $125,000 of his own money, lifting it to $250,000, and Fischer, who had been holding out for more, finally agreed to play.
Q 24After losing game six of the 1972 world title match, what did Boris Spassky famously do?
Applauded his opponent
Applauded his opponent: Spassky joined the audience in clapping the win that put Fischer ahead for the first time in a match he went on to take 12½–8½.
Q 25Which American grandmaster did Bobby Fischer call in at the last minute as his second for the 1972 world title match?
William Lombardy
William Lombardy, a Catholic priest as well as a grandmaster, did more than analyse: he is credited with persuading a wavering Fischer to play on.
Q 26FIDE accepted Bobby Fischer's ten-win format but refused which other demand in 1975?
The title at 9–9
The title at 9–9 would have stayed with Fischer, forcing a challenger to win 10–8, so FIDE said no; he refused to play and Karpov became champion without moving a pawn.
Q 27Karpov's stormy 1978 world title defence was held in which mountain resort city in the Philippines?
Baguio
Baguio saw Karpov lead 5–2, watch the challenger win three of the next four games to level at 5–5, then take game 32 to keep his title.
Q 28Which defector from the USSR twice challenged Karpov for the title, in 1978 and 1981?
Viktor Korchnoi
Viktor Korchnoi defected in 1976 and came to the 1978 match as a man without a country: when the Soviets objected to him using the Swiss flag, the jury banned flags from the table altogether.
Q 29What did Karpov's team send him mid-game in 1978 that rivals called a possible coded message?
A blueberry yogurt
A blueberry yogurt reached Karpov during game two, and the rival camp protested that it could be a coded instruction; they later called the protest a joke, but it was taken seriously at the time.
Q 30Garry Kasparov, world chess champion at 22 in 1985, was born in which Soviet city?
Baku
Baku-born as Garri Weinstein to a Jewish father and an Armenian mother, he took his mother's family name, Kasparov, as a boy, years before he became world champion.