Chess – The number of possible ways of playing the First 4 moves

• There are 318 Billion Possible Positions.
• There are 400 different possible positions after one move each(20 moves are possible for each player in the first move).
• There are 72,084 different possible positions after two moves each.
• There are over 9 million different possible positions after three moves each.
• There are over 318 billion different possible positions after four moves each.
• There are 169,518,829,100 ,544,000,000,000,000,000 (approximately 1.70 x 10^29) ways to play the first 10 moves of a game of chess.

Some interesting chess facts

The longest game of chess that is theoretically possible is 5,949 moves

Longest chess game ever was Ivan Nikolic vs Goran Arsovic , Belgrade, 1989, which ended in 269 moves. The game was a draw. The game lasted 20 hours and 15 minutes.

The Number of Electrons is approximately 10^79, while the Number of Unique Chess Games is 10^120

The shortest number of moves to achieve checkmate is just two moves!
One sequence is called “Fool’s Mate Runs”. Thus,
I. g4 e5 and
II. f4 Qh4 CHECKMATE