Disputed Statements

Whist, Games

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Year

Currently States 1650

Whist's exact origin is unclear; it grew out of the earlier English game Ruff and Honours and was already established by the mid seventeenth century, well before Edmond Hoyle's standardising 1742 treatise, which is a codification date rather than an origin date.

Source The Oxford Guide to Card Games tier 2

World Backgammon Championship, Competitions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Founding Year

Currently States 1967

Recorded results for the championship exist from 1967; the event's early history is less uniformly documented than its post-1979 Monte Carlo era.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 2

World Chess Championship, Competitions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Founding Year

Currently States 1886

1886, the year of the Steinitz versus Zukertort match, is generally regarded as the first officially recognized World Chess Championship because it was the first match organized specifically as a championship contest with an agreed stake and format. Steinitz was already regarded by many as the strongest active player from 1866, and an informal, retrospectively named succession of leading players is sometimes traced back to the mid eighteenth century, so earlier dates are sometimes cited for an unofficial lineage of championship level play. From 1993 to 2006 a rival championship lineage also existed after Garry Kasparov split from FIDE, a further complication in treating the title history as a single unbroken line.

Source The Oxford Companion to Chess, David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld tier 2

Xiangqi, Games

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Year

Currently States 1100

The mature form with the cannon piece and the river and palace layout is documented from the Song dynasty, roughly the eleventh and twelfth centuries AD; ancestral chess like play in China is attested centuries earlier, in Tang dynasty sources.