I stumbled across another dangerous waste of time: Chessgames.com. Think very carefully before you click.
Like most chess websites, it uses algebraic notation, which I can’t follow as easily as “P-K4.” However, it also has a “viewer” which allows you to step through each game on a virtual board.
A couple of well-known games in the archive there: Adolf Anderssen vs Jean Dufresne (1852); Anatoly Karpov vs Garry Kasparov (1985). There are more fireworks in either than during the Fourth of July.
Update: an interesting short story, possible connected with the chess position above1: “Master Jacobsen.”
Update II: Lord Dunsany was a pretty good chess player. Here’s a curiosity, a chess game between Capablanca and Lord Dunsany. Dunsany wrote a chess story of some note, “The Three Sailors’ Gambit.”
There is a fair amount of chess-inspired fiction. My favorite, aside from Through the Looking Glass, is Victor Contoski’s “Von Goom’s Gambit.” First published in Chess Review in 1966, it occasionally turned up in fantasy anthologies years ago, though finding it now would be a challenge. If it’s online, I missed it. It’s worth looking for if you have access to a large fantasy and science fiction library.
“The Royal Game,” by Stefan Zweig, is an excellent story with chess as the motif. It’s over 75 years old by now, so you may be able to find it in the public domain. My own copy is in a Readers Digest collection of ten novellas that also includes “Goodbye Mr. Chips” and “The Love of Seven Dolls.”
In any case, my love for the game far exceeds my ability. I played competitively in high school but have rarely kept it up since. I think I still have a chess.com account, but my days as a chess club regular are long past.