This paper is a summary of the master's degree thesis defended by the author with the title "Chess in check: a sociological analysis of its sporting history" (SOUZA, 2010). The research problem that the thesis has had on screen was the ability to recover and understand the conjunctural and market potentiated changes in chess sport's subfield at the level of supply and demand of the practice on the occasion of the end of the world championship 1972. And then evaluate what these changes meant or represented in the construction of "sports history" of chess. As a working hypothesis it was argued that during the historical and social context of the "match of the century", chess has known the "golden phase" of its "sports history", a condition that, from the joint empirical-theoretical carried out during the study, was proven.
Chess; Sports; History