Portal:Chess/Did you know/19

...that Swiss Grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi, pictured, won four Soviet Union national championships, two Candidates tournaments, and six Chess Olympiad team gold medals and qualified twice to play for the world championship but never earned the world title, having fallen by a combined twelve games to seven to Soviet Grandmaster Anatoly Karpov?
...that Beersheba, situated in the Negev desert in Israel, is home to eight grandmasters and, with one such player for every 22,875 residents, has the greatest concentration of grandmasters of any world city?
...that of the eleven players to have earned the grandmaster title from the Fédération Internationale des Échecs prior to attaining the age of fifteen, three, including Sergey Karjakin, the youngest-ever grandmaster, hail from Ukraine?
...that the nature of the origins of chess is highly controversial and that at least two games, the Persian and Indian shatranj and the Chinese xiangqi, and nine geographic locations are advanced as possible geneses for the game?
...that, whilst Reuben Fine's rule that an advantage of a rook or its equivalent should be necessary for one to win a pawnless endgame is demonstrably incorrect, most pawnless endgames featuring a two- or three-point differential are theoretical draws under the fifty-move rule?

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