Sultan Khan: The Indian Servant Who Became Chess Champion of the British Empire

By Daniel King

Hardly anyone paid attention when Sultan Khan arrived in London on April 26, 1929. A humble servant from a village in the Punjab, Khan had little formal education and barely spoke English. He had learned the rules of Western chess only three years earlier, yet within a few months he created a sensation by becoming the British Empire champion.



Sultan Khan was taken to England by Sir Umar Hayat Khan, an Indian nobleman and politician who used his servant’s successes to promote his own interests in the turbulent years before India gained independence.



Sultan Khan remained in Europe for the best part of five years, competing with the leading chess players of the era, including World Champion Alexander Alekhine and former World Champion Jose Raoul Capablanca. His unorthodox style often stunned his opponents, as Daniel King explains in his examination of the key games and tournaments in Khan’s career.

Daniel King has uncovered a wealth of new facts about Khan, as well as dozens of previously unknown games. For the first time he tells the full story of how Khan, a Muslim outsider, was received in Europe, of his successes in the chess world and his return to obscurity after his departure for India in 1933.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New in Chess
• Release date: Apr 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9789056918767

Daniel King

Daniel L. King, PhD, MPsych (Clin), is a senior research fellow and registered clinical psychologist in the School of Psychology at the University of Adelaide. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers on the topic of digital technology-based problems, with a focus on video gaming and simulated gambling activities. He was a 2016 recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) on the topic of maladaptive gaming. He has received four national awards for research achievement, including the 2017 Paul Bourke Award from the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA). He was an invited attendee of the recent World Health Organization (WHO) meetings on the public health implications of gaming and inclusion of Gaming disorder in the ICD-11.

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began.

PART I

India

CHAPTER 1

Sultan and his Master

‘Sir Umar always came in looking like he would draw his sword at any minute; he was a very fierce-looking figure. Sultan Khan was not.’ – W.Ritson-Morry¹

Sultan Khan. The name sounds noble, magnificent, even terrifying, reminiscent of the Mughal Emperors who conquered and ruled in northern India centuries before, but the reality was different. The future champion was born into a poor Muslim family in 1905 in a remote part of the Punjab, then part of the British Empire.²

This was a case of wishful nominative determinism – the family had no noble connection, but they hoped that their child would live up to his name.³

Sultan Khan’s home village of Mitha Tiwana lies on flat land between the Indus and Jhelum rivers around 500 miles north-west of New Delhi in the Sargodha district of what is now Pakistan. Although Mitha means ‘sweet water’ due to the natural springs that supply the village, the area is not naturally agriculturally rich.

He was one of ten brothers, and their father, Nizamuddin, was the religious leader of the community. Sultan earned the title ‘Hafiz’, accorded to those who are able to recite the whole of the Koran by heart. Whether he received any other kind of education is not known, but he certainly had a very limited knowledge of the English language when, some years later, he arrived in London. Proficiency in English would have been a pre-requisite to gaining any official post in British India, so that gives an indication of the family’s low social status.

Chess was popular in the family, as well as in the district. Sultan Khan learned the rules at the age of 9 from his father who was reputed to be a strong player, as was his grandfather. It should be emphasised, this was not the Western game, but chess with specific Indian rules – or some local variety of rules.

Khan stated later that he and his brothers were compelled to play the game. This is the first indication of a strained relationship between Khan and his father. Later Sultan Khan was to disclose, with modesty, that one of his brothers, who had died (presumably before Khan had started on his journey in the chess world) was the strongest of the siblings. This came to light in one of the first newspaper interviews that he gave in England, and he mentions the death in a matter-of-fact manner, suggesting that such tragedies were commonplace. Poor health was normal in poor areas.

We don’t know how Khan earned a living in his early years, but his family owned some land that he may have cultivated.⁴ Home life for him does not sound settled: it is said that his father married for a second time and that his new step-brothers and sisters shunned him in the house. This prompted Sultan to approach the de facto ruler of Mitha Tiwana, the local landowner, Sir Umar Hayat Khan, looking for work.

He had knocked on the right door. Sir Umar was a keen chess player and, recognising Sultan Khan’s potential, was happy to take him into his household.⁵

Sultan Khan would be unknown in the West, or even outside the Punjab, if it weren’t for his patron – and master – Colonel Nawab Sir Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana. His role in Sultan Khan’s story cannot be overstated: he spotted Sultan’s talent, took him into his household, provided tuition in Western chess, supported him financially, and was the prime mover in bringing him to Europe to test his skills against western opposition. Sir Umar and Sultan were so different in personality and social class, yet bound together by the game of chess.

Colonel Nawab Malik Sir Umar Hayat Khan (April 1930)

Sir Umar and Sultan Khan were complete contrasts. Sir Umar stood at well over six feet tall, was broad-shouldered, square-jawed and physically powerful; Sultan was, at most, five feet five inches and suffered from recurring bouts of malaria and, in Europe, regular attacks of influenza. Their physical appearance matched their personalities: Sir Umar was voluble, vain, clubbable, generous and extrovert; Sultan was mild-mannered, modest and introvert. No less contrasting was the difference in class.

Sir Umar Hayat Khan was a hereditary chieftain of the Tiwana clan in the Punjab, an experienced soldier in the Indian and British Army, a politician in the Indian legislature and a sportsman of renown, enjoying polo, horse racing, dog racing, camel racing, running, wrestling, hunting, falconry – and any other outdoor competitive pursuit that you might care to name.

He had inherited considerable landholdings all over the Punjab, but his principle income was derived from the Kalra estate on the Lahore side of the Jhelum River comprising 13,000 acres, not far from Mitha Tiwana where Sultan Khan was born.

The Tiwana clan had a reputation as fierce and courageous warriors, gained over centuries of fighting in northern India, a region that has seen foreign invasions going back to the earliest recorded history. They ensured their survival by sensing who was in the ascendancy – and then backing them. Sir Umar was fiercely loyal to the British, but he was only continuing the policy of his ancestors over the past millennium.

In Sanskrit, a Tiwana is a Hindu with knowledge of the three Vedic scriptures – the Vedas, Brahamanas and Upanishads. Yet the Tiwana embraced Islam in the 13th century. The Islamic Sultanate had come to power in Delhi in 1206, and this conversion might have been a way of ensuring the tribe’s survival. Whether this was serendipitous or not, they certainly proved to be politically adept over the following centuries.

By pledging allegiance to whoever was in power, the Tiwana were rewarded with land and political influence. They supported the Mughal Emperors in the 16th century but, by the early 19th century, seeing the wind blow in a different direction, assisted the Sikhs in expanding their power in the Punjab. Later, when British influence grew in India, the Tiwana switched their colours again and played a decisive role in the Anglo-Sikh battles of the 1840s. During the Indian revolt of 1857, several of the tribe remained loyal to the British and helped in putting down the uprising, not just in the Punjab, but continuing the campaign south into central India. One of those loyalists was Sir Umar’s father, Malik Sahib Khan, who led one thousand horsemen to recover Delhi from the rebels. For this he was handsomely rewarded by the British, and the Tiwana became the largest landholders in the Punjab.

In 1879, when Sir Umar was five years old, his father died, at which point the British took the main Kalra estate under their supervision until Umar was old enough to take charge. In the meantime, private tutors were provided to give him a very British outlook on life, and his education was completed at Aitchison College for Chiefs in Lahore.

This was typical of British policy throughout the sub-continent. From the time that they took over direct rule of India in 1858, a systematic attempt had been made to indoctrinate the sons of Indian nobility and the professional classes with the ethos of the British ruling classes. Cultivating like-minded native allies was crucial if Britain was to maintain control of its Empire, and that was particularly important in the remote, volatile and strategically significant north-west of India.

Indian public schools taught similar subjects and played similar sports and games to British public schools, so it is unsurprising that they also produced a similar breed of person:

‘The product may be limited in its intellectual range, narrow in its sympathies and arrogant in its assumptions, but at the same time it displays a capacity to set up and abide by standards of conduct and a readiness to accept responsibility.’ (The Indian Public School 1942)⁶

If we add vanity and a passion for pageantry and flummery, then this would be a reasonable description of Sir Umar.

Once he came of age and took over the running of his estates in the Punjab, in effect he became a feudal lord of the British. In return for autonomous rule over his landholdings, Sir Umar was expected to be a loyal subject – and fiercely loyal he proved to be.

Sir Umar served in the British Indian army (and the British army) in Somaliland (1903), Tibet (1903-4), Flanders (1914-15), Mesopotamia (1915), Punjab (1919) and Afghanistan (1919). He also acted as a recruiting sergeant. As a powerful landlord, Sir Umar had the means to distribute favours, and those living on his estates had good reason to remain loyal to him. During all these conflicts, he provided hundreds of recruits for the British. In return, Sir Umar was rewarded with more land, more titles and more political influence.

Significantly, in 1903 he was made Honorary Lieutenant of the Tiwana Lancers, a cavalry regiment raised by Sir Umar’s father. A mark of the esteem in which the Lancers were held is that the Prince of Wales – later King George V – became their colonel-in-chief in 1906. In 1911 Sir Umar was made the King’s Indian Herald at the Great Coronation Delhi Durbar of King George V and Queen Mary where his voice was described by one correspondent as ‘singularly penetrating’.⁷ The royal connection was later to open many doors for Sir Umar and, by extension, Sultan Khan.

With all his military accomplishments, his sporting prowess, and the honours heaped upon him by the British, perhaps it’s no wonder that Sir Umar’s vanity led him to pursue a decadent lifestyle. He organised lavish parties at his various residences and, in spite of being a devout Muslim, was a heavy drinker. Yet when combined with his sense of duty, this vanity also led him to perform good works on his estate: there was a mosque for Muslim tenants, but he also built a temple for Hindus. He provided education for all on the estate and helped those who found themselves in straightened circumstances. He didn’t just fulfil his feudal duties to the British, but to those living on his land as well, where he was a popular landlord.

Sir Umar’s generosity, combined with his passion for sport and chess, led him to invite Sultan Khan into his household. In effect, Khan became a court chess player, following in a tradition going back centuries to the Caliphs in the Middle East and the Mughal Emperors in India.

At his palace in Fatehpur Sikri, Agra, Emperor Akbar played board games in a huge indoor courtyard, including living chess, with real elephants, horses and servants for the remaining pieces. Akbar used chess as a way to test the character of his subjects.⁸

Sultan Khan joined Sir Umar’s household in 1926, an exciting time for Indian chess. There was increasing interest in the Western game, and that was undoubtedly due to the growth of the British educational system. From the beginning of the 19th century the British had recognised that if they were to maintain the jewel in the crown of their empire – the egregiously exploited and profitable Indian subcontinent – they would need to educate a professional class of Indians to run the vast country with its enormous population. After the tumultuous uprising of 1857, the British government took over the direct running of the country from the East India Company and even more effort was put into the foundation of government schools, colleges and universities in order to educate more Indians. By the mid-1880s, many thousands had obtained degrees, and another half-a-million had been through secondary school, all taught in English and inculcated with British political ideas.

A by-product of this development was that Western chess became more widespread – at least among this educated class of Indians.⁹

From around 1850 a steady flow of chess books was published in various Indian languages: Marathi, Bengali, Urdu, and Hindi. The first newspapers appeared in India in 1833, with regular chess columns spreading knowledge and cementing the European rules.¹⁰

In 1878 the first recorded round-robin chess tournament ever held in India took place in Calcutta. There was a healthy mix of British and Indian players, as shown by the joint winners, Robert Steele and I.C.Gossain. By the beginning of the 20th century the number of tournaments with Western rules was increasing and the trend was clear. In his 1913 book A History of Chess, H.J.R.Murray noted that,

‘… observers say that these [native] games are gradually losing ground, and there can be little doubt that in the long run […] will be replaced by the European chess.’

Indians were beginning to organise their own tournaments. The first ‘All-India’ tournament was held at the Beaman Chess Club in Bombay in 1909, and this started a tradition.

The growth in national consciousness at the end of the 19th century fuelled the ambitions of Indian chess players. The Indian National Congress Party had been formed in 1885 to represent the case for reform to the British government. However, in the face of British intransigence, Congress became more radical and grew into the leading voice for Indian independence. By the 1920s, when Mahatma Gandhi became leader, they had a membership numbering in the millions.

Internationally, India began to establish an independent profile from Britain thanks to its involvement in World War I. Over two million Indians served overseas for the Allies, and that led to India taking part in the post-war negotiations and becoming a signatory of the Versailles treaty. That in turn guaranteed India admission into the League of Nations in 1920 – despite its lack of domestic political autonomy – an anomaly that Britain supported as it could control India’s vote. Membership of the League instilled a greater sense of nationhood in India. How could it not, with ‘self-determination’ a fundamental aim of the Versailles treaty?

The construction of the Suez Canal in 1869, the introduction of the telegraph and the wireless, the growth of newspapers and, in the early decades of the 20th century, the development of aviation, connected India with the rest of the world as never before. Indian chess players were regularly hearing reports of tournaments in Europe and America, and they wanted to test themselves on the world stage.

A milestone in international recognition took place in 1924 when Vinayak Kashinath Khadilkar became the first Indian to participate in the British Championship.

Khadilkar was a landowner and educated. He had studied chess conscientiously and read many books on the Western style of play. A photograph of Khadilkar shows him smartly dressed in western clothes: a suit with a tie, and a watch-chain attached from his lapel into his top pocket, with a serious countenance to match. With the financial support of three Indian princes, Khadilkar sailed first class from Bombay to London and then on to the north-west of England to the affluent town of Southport, just along the coast from Liverpool.¹¹

Atkins, Yates and Thomas were the best English players of the time, all with international experience, and they comfortably took the top three places. In view of that, Khadilkar’s score of 4½/11 was respectable. He lost his first four games (perhaps still acclimatising to life in England?) but found his feet later on, managing to defeat, among others, R.H.V.Scott, who was British Champion in 1920. For a debut international tournament, Khadilkar had performed creditably. He was at his best in endgames, winning two opposite-coloured bishop positions in style; and this game finished with a punch:

W.A.Fairhurst

V.K.Khadilkar

British Championship, Southport (11)

23rd August 1924

position after 45.♗b2-d4

45…e3 46.♗xe3 ♗d5+ 47.♗f3 ♖7xf3

and White resigned.

Chail 1925

The following year, a tournament back at home had perhaps even more significance for Indian chess. Each year, the Maharajah of Patiala, Sir Bhupinder Singh, hosted a chess tournament at his palace in Chail, near to Simla in the Himalayan foothills. In 1925 Borislav Kostic, a well-known Yugoslav master, participated and it was the Indians’ results against him that confirmed to Sir Umar, and others, that they would be able to hold their own in western tournaments.

Kostic was a seasoned professional with a strong reputation. He had defeated Frank Marshall in a short match in Cologne in 1910, and began a peripatetic lifestyle from then on, living and playing in the USA for several years, before returning to Europe around 1920. His trip to India was part of a world tour between 1924-26 which also took him to China and Australia. He was noted for his blindfold simultaneous exhibitions.

Kostic arrived in India in March 1925, first playing a tournament in Bombay that he won by a comfortable margin. Then, while on a sight-seeing tour of the country, he met the gregarious Sir Umar Hayat Khan, who hosted him for a couple of weeks in Delhi. Now the old boys’ network came into play.

Sir Umar was so impressed by Kostic that he urged his friend, the Maharajah of Patiala, to invite him to his tournament. Sir Umar and the Maharajah had much in common: they had both attended Aitchison College in Lahore, both served in the British army in World War I, were passionate about sport, and shared a love of motoring. It is said that the Maharajah would drive around in a motorcade of 20 Rolls Royces.¹²

When Kostic arrived for the tournament in Chail, he was told that the Maharajah was in the middle of celebrating the birth of his twenty-eighth son, with performances by singers and dancers from all over India every night for three weeks, and therefore the tournament would be postponed for eighteen days. (Incidentally, the Maharajah sired an estimated eighty-eight children from his five wives and numerous concubines.)

The only draw that Joshi dropped was in the last round against Kostic. This was a full fight, the advantage swinging to the Yugoslav in the early middlegame, the Indian staging a powerful counter-attack, and missing several chances to win.

B.Kostic

N.R.Joshi

Chail 1925

position after 47.♔h4-h5

A chaotic position that later ended in a draw after 47…♘d3, but instead, 47…♕f1 would have won the game, e.g. 48.♕xg5 ♕xh3+ 49.♕h4 ♗f6 50.♕xh3 g6 mate.

For Joshi and Kishan Lal to match Kostic was a clear indication that Indian players were ready to play internationally. Interestingly, although Joshi won the tournament, Kostic marked out Kishan Lal as the strongest Indian player, so it was perhaps no surprise that Sir Umar employed him as a coach when Sultan Khan came to his attention not long after.

Kostic was so ashamed of his second place that he gave a false report to a newspaper claiming he had won.¹³

Given the momentum in Indian chess in the 1920s, it’s no wonder that Sir Umar was keen for Sultan Khan to make the transition from Indian to Western chess.

To that end Sir Umar gathered a coterie of renowned Indian chess players (‘by paying them fat salaries’) with the specific aim of schooling Sultan in Western chess:¹⁴ Kishan Lal Sarda – the most distinguished – reckoned to be the strongest player in India in the 1920s; Gurubaksh Rai, chess master at the court of the Maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir; and the older Ramsukh Kaka – Rai’s guru.

They were colourful characters.

Kishan Lal Sarda (1879-1934), given the nickname Chadrangwala (chess player) was by trade a buniya – a maker of Indian sweetmeats. Intriguingly, when Khadilkar played in the British Championship in 1924, The Times reported that he was one of the strongest players in India, ‘though it is an open question if he is better than Mr. Kissin [sic] Lal, whose caste prevents him from visiting this country.’

Born in Mathura, a city in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh between Delhi and Agra, his talent was spotted at an early age by a Bengali Doctor who took him to Calcutta where he soon acquired fame as a chess player.

‘Kishan was about 5 feet 6 inches tall, with pleasant features and had a dark bluish-black colour […] While playing he used to move his teeth in a round about fashion just like the lower jaw of a camel, so much so that by the time he was in his middle forties he had lost all his teeth!’ (Western Chess in British India by V.D. Pandit).

It is said that Kishan Lal was the main influence on Sultan’s playing style, although with little evidence of his games, this is difficult to gauge.

Western Chess in British India gives this description of his play:

‘[Kishan Lal] had a penchant for manoeuvring over the entire board. Though his knowledge of openings was scanty, his middle game play was simply superb. But it was in the end-game that he was a first-class master. As an end-game player amongst his contemporaries, he was unequalled.’

… and in this we can detect strong similarities to Sultan Khan.

From the same source, there is reference to a particular opening system:

‘Kishan always opened with 1.e4 and very much favoured playing 2.c4 afterwards, setting up a sort of ‘Stonewall’ for White. He loved to keep a blocked pawn-centre and then to manoeuvre on both flanks. His favourite strategy was to form a block in the centre by pawns at c4, d3, e4, then castle king’s side, play h2-h3, ♘h2 and initiate a king’s side attack by f2-f4, all the while keeping an eye open for a possible breakthrough on the queen’s side.’

Sultan Khan employed this set-up on more than one occasion:

Sultan Khan

E.E.Colman

British Championship, Hastings (4)

3rd August 1933

position after 14.f4-f5

The other two sparring partners for Sultan Khan were both from the Punjab. Gurubaksh Rai (1890?-1960?) was from Lahore and was also a regular player in the strongest Indian tournaments of the 1920s. We know little about Ramsukh Kaka, except that he was born in 1861. There is a charming story about this pair from the All-India tournament in 1928: Gurubaksh Rai gave Ramsukh Kaka a walkover, deeming it inappropriate to beat someone he looked up to as his guru.

Until the All-India Championship of 1928, we have no record of Sultan Khan’s games, and scant indication of how he progressed during his transition from Indian to Western rules. However, there is a vivid account of an idyllic scene described by a British army officer, Colonel William Grenville Irvine-Fortescue, later a regular player in Scottish chess championships:¹⁵

‘[…] in 1928, I found myself posted to Army Headquarters in Simla. Chess was flourishing in Simla, chiefly due to the patronage of an Indian nobleman, Nawab Sir Umar Hayat Khan. The Nawab himself was an indifferent player, but he was terribly keen, and maintained a team of professional chess players whose play, by constant practice, had reached a high standard. The leader of the team was Sultan Khan. […] Besides the professionals there was an active chess club, which met in the Y.M.C.A.

Every Sunday afternoon we used to gather in the garden of the Nawab’s summer residence, where he entertained us with a sumptuous tea, and Indian music. How would the chess players of today, accustomed to the religious hush of a modern tournament, where the lowest whisper is silenced by a fierce Shsss……! react to such conditions? The music usually consisted of an instrument like a cross between an accordion and a very small harmonium. It sat on the ground. The musician squatted beside it, working a sort of bellows with one hand, and playing on a keyboard with the other. There were one or more drummers. And there was the vocalist. His huge mouth, reddened with pon, used to open to a quite incredible extent, and from it poured such a volume of sound that all other sense data faded from one’s field of perception. Then when at long last his apparently inexhaustible lungs emptied, the drums would rise to a wild frenzy of rattlings and thumpings, and the Nawab, in an ecstasy of his enjoyment, would rock to and fro to the compelling rhythm.

But do not think there was no serious chess. Sultan would play one of his error-free games with Master, the next best professional. For 20 or 30 moves Master would find an answer to every one of Sultan’s tries, and then, slowly and inexorably, the position would change in Sultan’s favour, he would win a pawn, and all would be over. Some of the players used to get most excited. I remember one, who, in his eagerness to play a knight fork, swallowed the nut he was chewing. It stuck in his windpipe, he turned dark purple, and collapsed, together with the table and the chess board. A hard slap on the back restored his breathing. Still purple and gasping, he struggled to his feet. Set up the position, set up the position!, he shouted – only when this had been done did he remember to thank his rescuers.’

These years when Sultan Khan was living in comfort, with few demands, with the instruction and companionship of fellow chess players, and the future prospect of putting his skills into practice – this must have been an exciting time.

CHAPTER 2

Indian Rules

‘Maat or Burji is no game, Pyadi, Untmalli is higher aim, Ghodmalli, Gajmalli still higher claim, Vajeeri wins the topmost fame!’ – types of checkmate in the Punjabi game

How difficult would it have been for Sultan Khan to make the transition to Western chess? To judge that we need to go back and look at the rules of the game that he first learned. At this time in India there was no standardised form of the game, and Western chess was mainly played where there was the strongest colonial influence, in other words the big cities (the so-called ‘presidencies’) of Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta and Madras, by Europeans, or those that had received some kind of western education. Indian chess, in all its different varieties, was essentially a folk game, with knowledge passed on by word of mouth and by playing the game itself. There was no body of literature to facilitate proper scientific research.

We can only guess at the exact type of game played by Sultan Khan, but the following rules, recorded in Indian Chess History (Aaron & Pandit 2014), are specific to the Punjab and were being played ‘during the 1960s and earlier’. With some variations, these are typical of the game played in many parts of the Indian subcontinent at the start of the 20th century – and earlier. These rules are a hybrid of the older Islamic game of Shatranj played in the Middle East from the 7th century and imported into India through centuries of Muslim influence, and the more dynamic European game with its long-range queen and bishop that was introduced to India with the arrival of the colonial nations after 1500.

Here are the rules that are different from Western chess:

• Pawns move forward only one square at a time.

• Promotion: king and queen pawns promote to a queen. In other cases, a pawn is promoted to the piece according to file, i.e. promotion on a rook’s file results in a rook; on a knight’s file, a knight, etc.

• A promotion cannot result in three knights, two bishops of the same colour, three rooks, or two queens.

• When the players are left with only two pieces each, a draw is automatically declared. This is called chau-mohri.

• One point for a win, half a point for a draw, and three-quarters of a point for a half-win. A ‘half-win’ occurs when the defending side is left with a lone king.

• There is no castling. However, once in a game, a king can move like a knight providing it has not been checked earlier.

• At the start of the game the kings and queens do not stand opposite each other, i.e. white king on e1 and queen on d1; black queen e8, black king d8.

This endgame study demonstrates the chau-mohri rule and what effect it would have on play:

Pundit Vishnu Datt 1950

White to play and win (Punjabi rules)

In Western chess the rook could simply capture the pawns followed by the inevitable mate with king and rook. But here 1.♖xa3 would leave each side with two pieces each and an immediate draw under the chau-mohri rule. White has to be more subtle and force a win by using the opposition.

Here’s the main line:

1.♔b1 ♔g1 2.♔c1 ♔f1 3.♔d1 ♔g1 4.♔e1 ♔h1 5.♔f2 ♔h2 6.♔f3+ ♔g1 7.♔f4 ♔f1 8.♔e3 ♔g1 9.♔f3 ♔h1 10.♔g3 ♔g1 11.♖a1 checkmate.¹⁶

A simple study, but a demonstration of the practical difficulties with this version of the game.

These rules are the basics. Remember, there was no official organisation to lay down the law from above, so that rules for games and tournaments were agreed on an ad hoc basis and could be far more complex.

Perhaps the most notable of these variations was the concept of rewarding more difficult or rarer checkmates. For example, if you succeeded in checkmating with a pawn, or even better a rook’s pawn, you would earn bonus points. Your score might also depend on how much material your opponent still had on the board – the stronger his army, the greater your bonus. If queen, rook, bishop and knight have been captured and only the king and some pawns remain, the game is said to end in Burji (see rhyme above) and the opponent gets a point. Maat is a simple checkmate given by any piece other than a