Celebrities play chess

Princess Diana

 

Bill Gates

Madonna

Al Gore

Roelof Botha..grandson of South Africa’s former minister of Foreign Affairs…Pik Botha

Shakespeare

Chopin

John Steinbeck

Nikita Khrushchev

Lenin playing chess


Benjamin Franklin
Many celebrities played and enjoyed chess. Some of them were actually very good chess players. An interesting fact is that most of the Nobel Prize winners who played chess were in the fields of physics, literature and economics. A number of the high technology company founders play chess. Research on chess in schools demonstrates that playing chess helps children improve their logical and abstract thinking, decision-making and creativity. Might there be a correlation between chosen careers and early exposure to chess? Leading in your field takes courage, a lot of energy, strong intuition, adaptability, desire to achieve, and persistence. Let me break the myth– people persist not because they are “hungry to make money, get fame and wipe out the competition”, but because they are passionate about creating things that matter and love what they do.
This is only a brief list of famous people who played or are playing chess:

USA-based business leaders who play chess: Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft, born in Seattle), Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft, born in Seattle), Lawrence Ellison (co-founder of Oracle, born in New York City), Roelof Botha (venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital, early investor in YouTube, born in South Africa), Peter Andreas Thiel (co-founder of PayPal, early Facebook investor, born in Germany), Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay, French-born Iranian-American entrepreneur), Michael Birch (co-founder of Bebo, born in England), Barney Pell (co-founder of Powerset, born in Hollywood), David Cowan (Bessemer Ventures, co-founder Verisign, raised in NY), Auren Hoffman (Silicon Valley entrepreneur, CEO RapLeaf, born in New York), Carl Icahn (chairman of Imclone, raised in New York), George Soros (Wall Street investor, born in Hungary).

Artists and musicians: Bono (U2), Madonna, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Guy Ritchie, Frank Sinatra, Salvador Dali, Ludwig van Beethoven, David Bowie, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Sting, Enrico Caruso, Ray Charles, Cher, Frederic Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, David Oistrakh, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Richard Strauss, Giuseppe Verdi, Marcel Duchamp

Nobel Prize winners: Albert Einstein (physics), Albert Michelson (physics), Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (physics), Max Planck (physics), Carl Wieman (physics), Zhores Alferov (physics), William Lawrence Bragg (physics), Percy Bridgman (physics), Richard Feynman (physics), Peter Kapitza (physicist), Sinclair Lewis (literature), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (literature), William Yeats (literature), Elias Canetti (literature), John Cockroft (literature), Samuel Beckett (literature), Ivo Andric (literature), Isaac Singer (literature), Henryk Sienkiewicz (literature), William Golding (literature), John Steinbeck (literature)

Writers: William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Isaac Asimov, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson.

Royalty and Politicians: Al Gore (former US vice-president), Lenin, Queen Elizabeth II (queen of England), Queen Elizabeth I (queen of England), King Louis IV (French King), Abraham Lincoln (US President), George Washington (US President), Napoleon Bonaparte (French Emperor), Winston Churchill (British Prime Minister), Theodore Roosevelt (US President),Nikita Khruschev (USSR premier)
Please click HERE to see many more in all categories and in other categories too!

Famous people who played chess – click on the image for a larger view

Image:saintlouischessclub.org

More famous people who played chess

Info: saintlouischessclub.org