Originally posted by paulbuchmanfromfics
I believe he was also the USSR champion of draughts (checkers).
My father was a master checker player. By the way, he is 79 and recently crushed a state champion. We've been worrying about him losing his memory, and he played checkers as strong as he did 50 years ago. That was in incredible moment for me.
Draughts or American Checkers is played on an 8x8 board just like the chessboard. Russian checkers, or international checkers, is played on an 10x10 board. There are also many variations to the 8x8 board. There are many different standards for this game, e.g., Spanish Checkers, Polish Checkers, even Pool Checkers. Some play on the light squares while others play on the dark squares. Pool checkers even allows the pieces to move like bishops capturing pieces at a distance.
I have a collection of hundreds of books on checkers. Many of them date back to the mid-1800's.
Rudolf Anderssen, the chess players who played a match with Paul Morphy, was also the world checker champion. Several other chess masters were world class checker champions too.
Larry Evans, U.S. Chess champion several times, co-authored several books about chess/checkers with Tommy Wiswell.
http://www.bobnewell.net/nucleus/checkers.php
Checkers is not an easy game. It is just not in fashion these days. Opening systems, problem solving, study of the endgame, etc. All of these are just as important in checkers as in chess.
http://www.edcollins.com/checkers/index.html
American Checkers was considered mastered in the 1940's. A deck of cards was added giving the first two moves of the game. This too became boring after a decade or so and the deck was changed to three moves. That is, the first three moves of the game are predetermined by the card selected before the start of the game. These games also used clocks.
Chinook, a computer program, has now played every move possible in these openings and has determined the game to be drawn from the start unless someone makes a mistake. A few openings were believed to be lost from the start and were not included in the deck of cards, but this was based on the opinions and experience of the masters. Chinook also proved these openings that had been discarded to be losing moves.
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/
Marion Tinsley, former world checker champion, once said that checkers was like the ocean because of the vast amount of moves possible while checkers was like a deep well. There are basic techniques in checkers that may be 35 moves deep, and you must know all of these positions before you can even start to play competitively. That's what he meant by "like a deep well." In checkers you must be able to calculate very deep while most of the time in chess we may see four or five moves deep.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Tinsley
Who was it that replied to the question, "How many moves deep can you see?" "I only see one move, but it is always the best one."
http://usacheckers.com/index.php