page_title: World Chess Championship
section_title: Unofficial champions (pre-1886)
hierarchical_section_title: World Chess Championship / History / Unofficial champions (pre-1886)
caption_attribution_description: English: source - http://www.chess.com/photos/view_album/batgirl/old-masters?page=4 author - unknown, circa 1860 image of Howard Staunton (1810-1874)
context_page_description: The World Chess Championship is played to determine the world champion in chess. The current world champion is Magnus Carlsen of Norway.
  The first generally recognized world championship took place in 1886, when the two leading players in the world, Wilhelm Steinitz and Johannes Zukertort, played a match, which was won by Steinitz. From 1886 to 1946, the champion set the terms, requiring any challenger to raise a sizable stake and defeat the champion in a match in order to become the new world champion. Following the death of reigning world champion Alexander Alekhine in 1946, FIDE took over administration of the World Championship, organizing their first championship in a 1948 tournament. In 1993, reigning champion Garry Kasparov broke away from FIDE, which led to a rival claimant to the title of World Champion for the next thirteen years. The titles were unified at the World Chess Championship 2006, with the unified title again administered by FIDE.
  Since 2014, the schedule has settled on a two-year cycle with a championship held in every even year. Magnus Carlsen has been world champion since he defeated Viswanathan Anand in 2013.
context_section_description: A series of players regarded as the strongest (or at least the most famous) in the world extends back hundreds of years, and these players are sometimes considered the world champions of their time. They include Ruy López de Segura around 1560, Paolo Boi and Leonardo da Cutri around 1575, Alessandro Salvio around 1600, and Gioachino Greco around 1623. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, French players dominated, with Legall de Kermeur (1730–1755), François-André Danican Philidor (1755–1795), Alexandre Deschapelles (around 1800–1821) and Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais (1821–1840) all widely regarded as the strongest players of their time.
  Something resembling a world championship match was the La Bourdonnais - McDonnell chess matches in 1834, in which La Bourdonnais played a series of six matches – and 85 games – against the Irishman Alexander McDonnell, with La Bourdonnais winning a majority of the games.
  The idea of a chess world champion goes back at least to 1840, when a columnist in Fraser's Magazine wrote, "Will Gaul continue the dynasty by placing a fourth Frenchman on the throne of the world? -- the three last chess chiefs having been successively Philidor, Deschapelles, and De La Bourdonnais."
  After La Bourdonnais's death in December 1840, Englishman Howard Staunton's match victory over another Frenchman, Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant, in 1843 is considered to have established Staunton as the world's strongest player. A letter quoted in The Times on 16 November 1843, but probably written before that, described the second Staunton vs Saint-Amant match, played in Paris in November–December 1843, as being for "the golden sceptre of Philidor." The earliest recorded use of the term "World Champion" was in 1845, when Howard Staunton was described as "the Chess Champion of England, or ... the Champion of the World".
  The first known proposal that a contest should be defined in advance as being for recognition as the world's best player was by Ludwig Bledow in a letter to Tassilo von der Lasa, written in 1846 and published in the Deutsche Schachzeitung in 1848: "... the winner of the battle in Paris [in 1843, when Staunton defeated St. Amant] should not be overly proud of his special position, since it is in Trier that the crown will first be awarded." This was in reference to a proposed tournament to be held in Trier, where von de Lasa resided; but Bledow died in 1846 and the proposed tournament did not take place. 
  In 1850-51 the forthcoming 1851 London International Tournament was explicitly described as being for the world championship by three commentators: a letter from "a member of the Calcutta Chess Club" (dated 1 August 1850) and another from Captain Hugh Alexander Kennedy (dated October 1850) in the 1850 volume of the Chess Player's Chronicle; and the Liberty Weekly Tribune in Missouri (20 June 1851). Although Kennedy was a member of the organizing committee for the tournament, there is no evidence that crowning a world champion was an official aim of the tournament.
  The 1851 London tournament was won by the German Adolf Anderssen, establishing him as the world's leading player. Anderssen has been described as the first modern chess master. However, there is no evidence that he was widely acclaimed at the time as the world champion, although in 1893 Henry Bird retrospectively awarded the title to Anderssen for his victory.
  Anderssen was himself decisively defeated in an 1858 match against the American Paul Morphy, after which Morphy was toasted across the chess-playing world as the world chess champion. Morphy played matches against several leading players, crushing them all. Harper's Weekly (25 September 1858) and The American Union (9 October 1858) hailed him as the world champion, but another article in Harper's Weekly (9 October 1858; by C.H. Stanley) was uncertain about whether to describe the Morphy–Harrwitz match as being for the world championship. Soon after, Morphy offered pawn and move odds to anyone who played him. Finding no takers, he abruptly retired from chess the following year,
caption: Howard Staunton is considered to be the strongest chess player in world during the 1840s.
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