Word.ws English Dictionary

classical chess

classical chess noun: chess played at a slow time control, with games taking up to several hours (the most common format at professional tournaments).

Noun

classical chess (uncountable)

  1. Chess played at a slow time control, with games taking up to several hours (the most common format at professional tournaments).
    • All good things must come to an end, and so it was that Magnus Carlsen's record-breaking streak without defeat in classical chess was halted by Jan-Krzysztof Duda on Saturday.2020 October 12, George Ramsay, “Magnus Carlsen's 125-game unbeaten streak ended by Jan-Krzysztof Duda”, in CNN
    • The problem is not that computers have replaced people, but that they have curtailed their space for adventure, especially in "classical" chess played under long time limits at championship level. Players always arrived for tournaments well prepared, but they now use software as well as human...2021 November 26, John Gapper, “Chess faces stalemate in its match with machines”, in Financial Times

Questions about classical chess

What does classical chess mean?
Classical chess means chess played at a slow time control, with games taking up to several hours (the most common format at professional tournaments).
What part of speech is classical chess?
Classical chess is a noun.

Words near classical chess in the dictionary

  1. classical antiquity
  2. Classical Arabic
  3. Classical Aramaic
  4. Classical Armenian
  5. Classical Azerbaijani
  6. classical chess
  7. Classical Chinese
  8. classical cipher
  9. classical ciphers
  10. classical college
  11. classical colleges

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: classical chess (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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