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© Copyright 1997, Jim Loy
More people play checkers than chess, when they are young. Serious chess players vastly outnumber serious checker players. And serious checker players sometimes are defensive about that, and will tell you that checkers is better than chess. Well it is, in some ways. And, chess is better in other ways.
Checkers on an 8x8 board, is the checkers game played mostly in Great Britain (where it is called draughts), USA, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and a few other countries. The most popular version of checkers, however is played on a 10x10 board in Eastern Europe. In the USA, that game is sometimes called Polish Checkers. Elsewhere, it is called International Draughts. They are starting to play our game, and we are starting to play their game, due to the efforts of the International Checkers Hall of Fame. There are other 8x8 varieties played in Spain and Italy and elsewhere.
There is a widespread misconception about checkers, that it is a dead game because it is "solved," that a super-computer can play perfect checkers the way that the ship's computer plays chess on Star Trek. It can be shown that CHESS can't be solved with any computer smaller than the entire universe. Roughly the same is true of checkers, even though it is more limited than chess.
There are two main styles of checkers played in tournaments, Go-As-You-Please (sometimes called Freestyle or Unrestricted) and 3-Move Restriction. In Go-As-You-Please, you can make any opening moves that you want. In 3-Move, the first 3 moves (Red-White-Red) are chosen at random from a list of accepted 3-Move openings. The list contains no openings that are known losses. 3-Move is more popular in serious tournaments and matches, as it decreases the number of draws. After playing a game with one of the 3-Move openings, you play a second game with the same opening, but from the other side of the board, to even out the disadvantage of having to play a weak opening (such as the Octopus or the Skull Cracker).
There are World Championship Matches in both styles. The 3-move World Championship is the more prestigious. There are National Championship Tournaments, District Tournaments, State Tournaments, local tournaments, mail tournaments, mail ladders, International Team Matchs (both over-the-board and mail), and other events.
The U.S. National Tournament is currently the strongest and most prestigious tournament in the world. Every 4th year, the winner of that tournament is the official challenger for the World Championship. Midway between these years, the British Championship Tournament determines the official challenger for the World Championship. The American Checker Federation (ACF) is the official organization in the USA. Membership is $25 per year. The address is ACF, Charles C. Walker, P.O. Box 365, Petal, MS 39465. The Bulletin is published every other month.
There are thousands of checker books, most of them unavailable at your local bookstore. Contact the ACF for information about book dealers.
Marion Tinsley, PhD, who died in 1995, was widely considered the greatest checker player in history. Over a 67-year period, in tournaments and individual matches, he lost only 22 games, many of those while still nearly a teenager.
Asa Long, won the World Checker Championship in 1936, holding the Title until 1948. In 1985, he challenged for the World Championship, his fifth match for the Title over a span of 49 years, in a career lasting over 60 years. That's probably a record for competitive games and sports at the world-class level.
Until recently, computers have not done well at checkers (probably because the effort was not profitable). Then in the 1990 USA National Tournament, Chinook (a program at the University of Alberta) took 2nd place, behind Marion Tinsley. A micro-computer program tied for 5th place. Since then, Chinook has done even better, as its ending database increased in size (currently 443,748,401,247 positions). A Man-Machine World Championship has been created, in addition to the other World Championships. Tinsley held that until 1994, when Chinook won it when Tinsley had to forfeit due to ill health. Chinook then successfully retained this title, by drawing a match with Don Lafferty in 1994 and beating Lafferty in 1995.
The USA currently dominates the game of checkers. But many of the strongest players are in their 60's and 70's. England seems to be coming on strong, with some younger players.
In Checkers-By-Mail, Jerry Childers of Tuckerman, AR, recently defeated the World Champ, Richard Fortman of Springfield IL, to become the new World Champion of that form of checkers.