Famous Draughts Players and the World Championship

Draughts fame is a quiet kind of fame. The game has world champions, national federations and centuries of published theory, yet its great names rarely escape the club circuit into general knowledge. That’s a shame, because the people who shaped the game are a genuinely odd and interesting bunch: champions who invented rival games, chess legends moonlighting with draughtsmen, a Spanish author beating the entire board-game world to print by centuries.

This piece sticks to figures and facts our research sources document, which makes it less a hall of fame than a walking tour. Draughts history is patchily recorded, and we would rather tell you the well-evidenced stories than pad the list with names we can’t stand behind.

Herman Hoogland, the champion who built his own game

The best story in draughts belongs to Herman Hoogland (1891–1955), who became the Netherlands’ first world draughts champion in 1912. Winning the world title of the 10×10 international game would be legacy enough for most players. Hoogland’s second act was stranger: in 1923 he invented a variant of his own, in which kings gained the power to capture enemy kings orthogonally, a tweak designed to make drawish king endings winnable.

He then spent decades promoting it, through his own magazine and a first tournament in The Hague in 1930, and after the Second World War his game had spread to some twenty countries. Admirers called it the “Esperanto of Checkers”. The comparison was apter than intended: like Esperanto, it thrived on the energy of its founder, and when Hoogland died in the mid-1950s the game faded with him. A world champion’s own variant, played across twenty countries, gone within a generation. Draughts history is full of these near-misses.

The chess world champion at the draughts board

Emanuel Lasker held the world chess championship, and board-game history remembers him for that. Draughts history remembers something else: in 1911, in Germany, Lasker invented Laska, a 7×7 draughts-family game in which captured pieces are stacked beneath the capturing piece rather than removed, waiting to be liberated by a later jump. A chess world champion looking at draughts and deciding the capture rule was worth reinventing tells you how seriously the strongest game-players of that era took this family of games.

Lasker’s game survives in the catalogues of variant collectors to this day, one of the earliest and most distinguished entries in a long line of invented draughts games.

Christian Freeling and the fight against the draw

No living designer has poked at draughts more productively than the Dutchman Christian Freeling. His HexDame (1979) moved the game onto a hexagonal grid and remains the most popular hexagonal form. Dameo (2000) reworked how whole lines of men advance. His most pointed invention is Killer Draughts (2003), international draughts with one altered king rule, aimed squarely at the top-level game’s chronic draw problem. In Amsterdam tournaments held in 2004 and 2005, Killer Draughts produced only about five percent draws.

That number deserves a moment. Championship draughts is magnificent, and it struggles with draws in a way that its own community keeps trying to engineer away. Anti-draw variants are the game’s research laboratory, and Freeling runs its most famous bench.

The authors who got there first

Championship play needs a rulebook, and rulebooks need writing. The game’s early literature has some remarkable firsts, and they are older than you’d think.

The first book about the game, anywhere, was Antonio de Torquemada’s, published in Valencia in 1547; Spain’s central place in the game’s early history runs right through the scholarship. In Paris in 1668, Pierre Mallet’s book on the jeu de dames appeared, and it contains, among much else, the earliest known reference to give-away draughts, the play-to-lose form still enjoyed today. The first German draughts book was Johann Wolfgang Schmidt’s, printed in Nuremberg around 1700. And the earliest documentation of Frisian draughts, the ferociously sharp orthogonal-capture game of the northern Netherlands, is Swaanenburg’s book of Amsterdam, 1725.

One more literary trail is too good to leave out. Frisian draughts reached Sweden in the luggage of one Lars Mollberg (1734–1772), who learned it in Amsterdam around 1750 and carried it home to Stockholm, where the poet Carl Michael Bellman mentioned the game in 1783. A board game that appears in eighteenth-century Swedish poetry has earned its place in an article about fame.

And Frisian draughts is no museum piece: it has had its own league since 1932, its kings are called wolves, and in Friesland it’s the ordinary international game that gets the qualifying name. Locals call standard draughts “Oer Hoek”, over the corners, while their own eight-direction game is “Oer Alles”, over everything. Confidence like that deserves a wider audience.

The historians who made the game respectable

Draughts owes a debt to a small group of scholars who treated it as seriously as chess. H. J. R. Murray’s A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess (1952) gave the field its canonical reference, imperfect but towering. David Parlett’s Oxford History of Board Games (1999) carried the story to a wider readership. The Dutch researcher Arie van der Stoep, whose History of Draughts appeared in 1984, is the closest thing the game has to an academic authority, and Govert Westerveld’s 2009 history pressed the case for Spain’s role in the game’s origins. When this site makes a claim about draughts history, the trail usually ends at one of these four.

So who runs the World Championship?

Two bodies, for two games, and the distinction matters.

International draughts, the 10×10 game, is governed by the FMJD, the World Draughts Federation. It is the most widely played form of draughts in the world, with tournament play recorded across more than sixty countries, and its world championship is the one usually meant when “world draughts champion” appears without qualification. Hoogland’s 1912 title stands at the head of that tradition.

English draughts, the 8×8 game this site is devoted to, has its own championship structure under the World Checkers Draughts Federation, alongside national bodies like the English Draughts Association and the American Checker Federation. Its top-level play has a distinctive flavour: tournament openings are often drawn from a deck of prescribed three-move sequences, so championship games start from forced variety rather than each player’s pet lines. Even the equipment is codified, down to boards in green and buff and pieces in red and white, which the literature nonetheless insists on calling Black and White.

The full record of the English and American match-play masters who built that championship tradition is a story our sources only gesture at, so we’ll leave their names for a piece that can do them justice rather than list them half-sourced here.

Standing on the same squares

Every player in this article stared at the same 64 or 100 squares you can stare at tonight. The rules they mastered, argued over and occasionally rewrote are the ones in our rules of draughts, forced captures and all, minus the historical oddities like huffing that the championship game shed along the way. Their game is entirely playable at your kitchen table.

Start where they started: play draughts online against the computer, work through the ideas in our beginner strategy guide, and be grateful the openings deck is optional.

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