Wilhelm Steinitz, the first world champion
Wilhelm Steinitz (1836-1900) is generally recognized as the first official World Chess Champion. In 1886 he won a match against Johannes Zukertort that was played explicitly "for the Championship of the World," by eleven games to five. Chess writers still debate whether his reign really began in 1866, when he beat Adolf Anderssen, rather than in 1886, so a careful history simply counts the 1886 match as the first one fought under that formal banner. Steinitz was also a hugely influential teacher of chess theory, and the championship remained his in some sense until Emanuel Lasker took it in 1894.
Mikhail Tal, the magician from Riga
Mikhail Tal (1936-1992) was the eighth World Champion, and hardly anyone has ever attacked the way he did. Born in Riga, he earned the nickname "the Magician from Riga" for an explosively creative, sacrificing style that left opponents baffled. In 1960, at 23, he beat Mikhail Botvinnik in a title match in Moscow, making him the youngest world champion of his day. His reign lasted barely a year before Botvinnik won the 1961 rematch, but Tal kept playing at an elite level for decades. He once held the record for the longest unbeaten streak in competitive chess: 95 games without a loss.
Bobby Fischer, the Brooklyn prodigy
Bobby Fischer won his first United States Championship at 14, the youngest American ever to do so, and it began a record run of eight US titles. In 1972 he beat Boris Spassky in Reykjavik to become the first American to win the World Championship, in what newspapers called the Match of the Century. Fischer was born Robert James Fischer, but to the chess world he was always Bobby. His deep, impatient calculations changed how top players thought about the game, even as his later life moved away from competition.
Garry Kasparov, the youngest and the machine's rival
Garry Kasparov became the youngest undisputed World Champion in 1985 at 22, beating reigning champion Anatoly Karpov, a record he held for decades. His name is inseparable from the rise of machines. In 1996 he beat IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer in a six-game match, but in a 1997 rematch he lost, becoming the first world champion ever defeated by a computer in a match played under standard tournament conditions. Later a prominent public figure, Kasparov remains one of the most famous chess names in the world.
Magnus Carlsen, the modern champion
Magnus Carlsen, born in Norway in 1990, learned chess at five and became a grandmaster at 13. FIDE rated him the top player in the world in 2010 at 19, and in 2013 he beat Viswanathan Anand in Chennai to become World Champion at 22. He went on to win five world titles in a row before announcing in 2022 that he would not defend his crown again. More than any previous champion, Carlsen grew up alongside super-strong chess computers, and he is widely credited with reshaping how the modern game is played.
These five players span more than a century of chess. Between Steinitz's careful theorizing and Carlsen's computer-honed instincts, the game changed utterly, and each of them left it different from how they found it.