The Friday File: Assuming each player makes 40 moves, there are conservatively about 10120 possible chess games. Ignoring silly moves, the number falls to a more manageable 1050. For example, after each player has moved just five times, there are already 69,352,859,712,417 (69.35 trillion) possible games that could have been played. As a comparison, the numbers of atoms in the observable universe is roughly estimated to be 1080. Chess anyone?