It has recently been reported in Science that researchers have used brute force to completely solve checkers, allowing for any game, independent of the opposition, to be won or drawn. The researchers used 50 computers over the course of 20 years to search through every possible of the 500 billion billion possible games. I suspect it will remain a long time before chess is cracked.
In the linked article it mentions that Connect 4 had already been solved. A little while ago in Room 408 we went through a phase of playing Connect 4 on the board. We were pretty sure that it could be solved so that the player who went first could always win or draw, but we never wasted the time to prove it ourselves, which is a good thing since it seems that it had been done already.