Past winners have included Maurizio Pollini (1960), Martha Argerich (1965), Krystian Zimerman (1975), Yundi Li (2000), Rafał Blechacz (2005) and Seong-Jin Cho (2015).

Żurawlew recalled later: "Young people at that time, not long after the end of the Great War, were taking a keen interest in sports.

All that showed a fundamental lack of understanding, which I found very painful... As I watched young people’s enthusiasm for sporting achievement, I finally hit upon a solution: a competition!

[6] Many years later Jerzy Żurawlew wrote, “[…] I was greatly helped by my friend Henryk Rewkiewicz, director of the Match Monopoly, who offered 15,000 złoty - a substantial sum at the time - for the Competition”.

However, due to repeated cases of jurors and competitors falling sick in this period, the organizers decided that the competition be held in October, the month in which Chopin died.

[11][12][13] Traditionally, during the competition on 17 October – the day of Chopin's death – a solemn mass is celebrated in the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw, during which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem is performed in accordance with the wishes of the composer.

The Chopin Competition is a major plot device in the Japanese manga series Forest of Piano, serialized from 1998 to 2015 and adapted as an anime from 2018 to 2019.

[28] Creator Makoto Isshiki was inspired to write the series when she watched a documentary showing Stanislav Bunin winning the XI International Chopin Piano Competition.